Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:04 pm on 12 December 2017.
Myself and the Member for Merthyr Tydfil represent very similar communities in the Heads of the Valleys, and I saw her response to the Valley Cops tv programme. I shared many of your frustrations. Sometimes, programme makers' desire to create drama on our screens means that they don't always represent the reality of life in our communities, wherever they happen to be. I think that's certainly a case in point.
Can I say this? I've met with both the police commissioners from South Wales Police and from Gwent Police. I met them last week to discuss this report, but also how we take these matters forward over the coming months and years. I found it very refreshing to hear both police commissioners talking about how they wanted to work alongside their colleagues in Dyfed-Powys and in north Wales, and also seeing themselves as a part of our communities, wanting to work with, across and through some of the barriers that have been created by statute, which affect us all. I felt that it was a very positive example of how police commissioners can actually help act as catalysts themselves to bring together different community groups to deliver community safety within and across all of our communities whereby some of the issues that have been raised by the Member for Merthyr are clearly affecting the lives of too many people at present.
So, I hope that we will be able to continue with the Welsh Government providing a catalyst and leadership, bringing together devolved and non-devolved agencies and organisations to ensure that we have very clear shared vision of how we intend to deliver for our communities, and then to establish—and this is absolutely key, Deputy Presiding Officer, to what I'd like to say this afternoon—is that we need to establish a very clear plan of action so that we will be able to create a tempo whereby we can move forward with pace and with some speed in order to deliver some very real community benefits. I think we've already seen some of that: the groundbreaking work of this Government and the previous Assembly in the violence against women Act has brought together services that couldn't have been done before and without the leadership of the Welsh Government and the National Assembly for Wales. I hope that that has established a template for how we can move forward in the future to deliver a holistic approach to some of the deepest rooted problems we have in our communities, and I'm absolutely convinced that that holistic approach is one that will deliver real benefits for people in Merthyr and elsewhere in the country.