Well, I make no excuses for repeating some of the figures used by Bethan Sayed and others, because they deserve repeating time and time again. Approximately 600,000 children live in Wales. Of those, one in three, or 200,000, are in poverty; 90,000 are living in severe poverty. More than half of Welsh children in low-income families are worried their parents are finding it harder to pay for everyday necessities such as food, heating and clothes.

Unfortunately, the rhetoric in this Chamber blames cuts to benefits as the main cause of poverty. This is just not the case. Lack of good, well-paid jobs is the greatest factor affecting poverty in Wales, whether it is poverty for children or the sector as a whole. It is the failure of the Welsh Government to provide those jobs that is the reason for the appalling situation and figures for poverty in Wales. It is a lame excuse to blame UK Government benefit cuts, as unwelcome as they are, for the increasing number of food banks and other indicators of poverty in Wales. The only true and sustained route out of poverty is employment—good, well-paid employment. The Welsh Government claims that unemployment levels are at an all-time low but masks the fact that much of that employment is part-time, or worse, through the iniquitous zero-hours contract system of so-called employment.

I do believe strenuous efforts are now being made by the Welsh Government to alleviate this problem: better apprenticeship programmes, an education system much more aligned to business needs and a number of interventions designed to get the long-term unemployed back into work. But all this against the backdrop of 20 years of Labour Government in Wales—a Government that promised to eradicate poverty by 2020, and needless to say, there's not much time to achieve that goal. And I will point out that for 13 of those 20 years, there was a Labour Government in the UK Parliament at that time. Twenty years that included the debacle of the Communities First programme, which the Government promised would bring an end to poverty in our most deprived areas, and which actually delivered, apart from some isolated cases, almost nothing: £410 million down the drain. Evidence for this lies in the figures quoted above. One wonders how many real long-term jobs would have been created if we had given £1 million with proper controls to 410 proven entrepreneurs.

It is now time for the Welsh Government to deliver on their promises. The people of Wales, and especially those condemned to a life of poverty, deserve better than that delivered in the last 20 years.