Questions now from the party spokespeople. The Conservatives' spokesperson, Mark Isherwood.

Diolch, Llywydd. This morning you issued a joint written statement with the Minister for Housing and Regeneration on the early prevention, intervention and  support grant. You spoke about planning, commissioning and delivering services reflecting the complexity of people's lives, and the inter-relationships between their support needs. You confirmed what the finance Secretary said yesterday: that the grant would be split in two, between housing-related and non-housing-related elements, with the establishment of a children and communities grant for the pieces falling within your remit. You also said that you'll work in partnership with local authorities and wider stakeholders to take forward the new arrangements, and emphasised the importance of early intervention and prevention. Can you therefore confirm, or will you confirm, whether that funding will now be ring-fenced, as grants generally are, or will it be going into the revenue support grant? If it's not ring-fenced, how will the Welsh Government be monitoring and evaluating outcomes to establish whether this money actually found its way to where it was intended?

Can I, before answering, Presiding Presiding Officer, welcome the new Conservative spokesperson to his place? I hope I gave him a more enthusiastic welcome than some of his colleagues did this afternoon. [Laughter.] I really feel they could do better there. Can I say that I'm looking forward to many conversations and engagement with you, Mark, over the coming period? 

In terms of the grant that you refer to, we have been giving real, deep consideration to how we bring together the integration that we want to see, whilst ensuring that that money continues to reach the recipients who need it, and does so in a coherent way that enables their needs to be met. I hope that the decision we have announced today—in terms of a two-grant model, if you like, which we are giving an undertaking that we will maintain for the rest of the Assembly—is one that will meet the needs of recipients but will also allow local authorities and others to deliver the sort of integration that they require. But, in direct answer to your question, yes, we will ensure that those grants do have their own integrity.

Well, I'll look forward to exploring that further with you in the future to establish what 'integrity' means in that context. Now, we know—and I know it's not directly in your brief, but I'll get to the relevance—that the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 Part 2 code of practice and guidance puts in place a system where people are full partners in the design and operation of care and support, giving them, quote, 

'clear and unambiguous rights and responsibilities.'

Now, in your statement today—your written statement—you refer to planning, commissioning and delivering services, and I'm regularly having concerns and allegations expressed to me that we're still seeing consultation from above after decisions have been reached and then commissioning on a traditional commissioning model, which can disadvantage local providers.

Earlier this summer, in Flintshire, the council awarded its service contract to provide disability support services to the non-local provider who'd had it previously. I attended their annual general meeting, asked the people present—90 per cent of whom were disabled—whether they had been involved, as the legislation said that they should have been, in the design and delivery of their services, and they all told me that they had not been involved. Given your responsibilities for local government, for planning, commissioning and delivering services, and for voluntary sector and related issues, how do you propose to help local authorities better understand that this isn't an option, it's a requirement of Welsh Government legislation that had the support of all parties here in the last Assembly, and that they must start doing this? 

We will be evaluating the pathfinders and looking at many of the issues that you've raised this afternoon as a part of that. The interim report was published today, and we will continue to work with the independent evaluators to understand some of those issues before their final report is published, which, I hope, will be in the early summer of next year. 

But the purpose of bringing together these grants, creating the housing support grant and creating the children and communities grant, is to pilot and to drive new ways of working—sure, involving people in designing these grants and designing the projects and programmes that support those people, but also integrating different functions, integrating services and integrating organisations to work more closely together. It is exactly the sort of reform programme that we want to see in local government where we are able to invest in people but actually achieve far more than we could have done if we were working in silos under the previous system. 

Well, I hope the Welsh Government will help local authorities better understand how they're supposed to reconcile commissioning and procurement requirements with co-production and co-design of services with local people, where the co-design may be different to the commissioning choice. 

My final question relates to poverty—again, not a matter in your brief, although many of the key agencies and services are. In the middle of July, I went to a Wales Centre for Public Policy event in Bangor University, 'Reigniting Debate on Rural Poverty: Evidence, Practice & Policy Implications'. This emphasised the importance of the third sector, it highlighted a lack of integrated rural policy, an asset-based approach in line with the well-being Act being required, the need to value expertise and reach the voluntary sector and wider community through local empowerment and the Welsh Government's leader approach, and identified a gap between policy and practice, with good intentions not followed through.

Similarly, last week, you might have seen that the Bevan Foundation circulated a report from the Social Metrics Commission, which is an independent commission that has brought to bear thinkers from across the political spectrum to look at a new approach to measuring poverty. They tell us that the remeasurement will have more accurate estimates of things like housing, childcare, disability, the length of time a family's been in poverty and so on, that 24 per cent of the population of Wales live in poverty, and a higher proportion of people live in poverty in Wales than any other nation. And they say they welcome—the Bevan Foundation welcome—the launch of the new measure, and the new measure provides a much more realistic and nuanced understanding of poverty in Wales. But how do you respond to their statement that this should be used to inform a comprehensive and practical action by the Welsh Government, local authorities, businesses and other bodies, such as those referred to in the rural poverty report I mentioned earlier, to solve poverty in Wales? 

I would respond by agreeing with the Bevan Foundation in their analysis. Clearly, we do need to have that level of understanding of the human impacts of poverty, if we are to address it in a more holistic way. Perhaps I could answer the question with an illustration that is actually within my portfolio, which is in terms of the Valleys taskforce, where we are looking at exactly that range of indicators to understand both the nature of poverty in our communities, but also the tools and levers we have that can best be used to address those issues of poverty. Let me say this: it is important that we are able to attack poverty at its root. That is why we're seeking to both create work, but fair work, and then to ensure that we don't simply address the economic aspects, but we look at all the community, social, family, and cultural aspects of poverty as well, so that we can address poverty in the holistic way that I suspect the Bevan Foundation is seeking to describe, and which I hope the Conservative spokesperson is also seeking to describe.

The UKIP spokesperson, Gareth Bennett.

Diolch, Llywydd. One of the consequences of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 has been the creation of public services boards. As you know, Minister, the main purpose of the PSBs is to strengthen joint working across all public services in Wales. How do you assess how well the PSBs are operating, and have we seen an improvement in joint working across the public services?

I hope that we are seeing joint working. The public services boards have now completed their planning period and have programmes that they're now seeking to deliver. Clearly, each programme will have its own objectives, and we—and, I hope, Members across the whole of this Chamber will be holding their own public services boards to account for delivering on those programmes and those objectives.

Yes. Thanks. I hope so too. We had a scrutiny session on the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee on the PSBs just before the summer recess, so we did have a snapshot from various organisations as to how well things were working. One point that was made by various witnesses was that we have several PSBs that aren't chaired by someone from a local authority. This can be a good thing, because we don't want the PSBs to feel as though they are dominated by the local authority. On the other hand, there is a potential problem in that, if they are not led by the local council, then the council may send a relatively junior figure to the PSB meetings, who may carry little delegated authority. This would obviously hinder the PSB from operating effectively. How do you think this problem can be resolved?

I hope that what we are seeing is a different dynamic with the public services boards. I believe that they're more constructive than the local service boards that preceded them. We've seen their local well-being plans. I think there's a broad variety there, which reflects the different ambitions from PSBs across Wales. I welcome that variety. I welcome the fact that PSBs are discharging their functions with a level of creativity and co-ordinated and joint working that perhaps has been missing from elements of the public sector in the past. I look forward to a period in front of the committee—I suspect it's later this month—and I look forward to debating these issues with you. I also look forward to understanding what the committee's evidence has been and its conclusions, and I look forward to reading the committee's report.

Yes. Thanks. We will see a variety of different working methods, I'm sure, and it may not be the same from one area to the next. Hopefully, they will work effectively. Now, the public services boards in Gwent—or what used to be Gwent—may be a good model. We were told on the committee that many PSBs in Gwent may be local authority led, but they don't feel as though they are local authority dominated. Another part of the public services boards is the voluntary organisations or the third sector, as we now often call them. A couple of the witnesses at the committee scrutiny said that PSBs have felt quite bureaucratic thus far, and haven't felt close to the third sector. Do you feel this to be the case, and how can this be improved going forward?

I don't want to use that sort of terminology to describe the way that PSBs are working. Can I say this? I think there is a great deal of complexity in the way we govern and the processes and structures that we have. One of my ambitions and objectives is to reduce our complexity in Government and to reduce the amount of governance, if you like, that we conduct in Wales. I want to see more streamlined structures that enable the public to hold clearly identifiable politicians to account for the decisions that they take, and I want to see public service workers feeling that there is very clear leadership from the political leadership locally and in this place. So, I want to see a far more streamlined way in which decisions are taken in Wales. I want to see fewer meetings and more action, and I hope that what the PSBs are doing is starting to deliver that. But I do feel that, having seen the well-being plans earlier in the summer, it is right and proper that we now allow those PSBs the freedom and the opportunity to deliver on the objectives that they have set themselves.

Plaid Cymru spokesperson, Bethan Sayed.

Minister, can you indicate how confident you are that, if a fire breaks out in a high-rise block of flats here in Wales, we won't see a tragedy that we saw in London?

Ever since the terrible tragedy at Grenfell Tower, Welsh Government has been working very hard, first of all, in the first instance, to identify all of our high-rise buildings, and then to work with those to understand whether or not they had the ACM cladding on them. So, I can confirm that Welsh Government now has a personal relationship, actually, with each of those high-rise buildings that we have in Wales to try and ensure that the residents within them are as safe as possible and that we're able to provide them with the best advice possible. We've been working very closely with the fire and rescue services and with the local authorities that have high-rise buildings in their areas in order to ensure that we can be as confident as possible about the safety of those buildings and the people living in them.

Thank you for the answer, but I'm frankly not as reassured as you. In our local government committee last week we heard evidence from the fire service, and they said there are people who are undertaking fire-risk assessments who are not competent, that people are taking off fire doors from flats and replacing them with those that are not as safe, and that there is no money for either the fire service or local authorities to monitor safety. In fact, three witnesses made it clear, because there was a lack of expertise, a lack of those resources, and confusion over responsibility across the board, that they weren't sure that they could be keeping the resources where they needed them to go.

I think it's worth me quoting one of those who came to give evidence, Dave Holland, head of shared regulatory services between Bridgend, Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan, who said, and I quote:

'In 1991, when the regulations first came in, it's an oddity that we had a community of capable enforcers in the trading standards service, reasonably well resourced, but a set of regulations that were difficult to apply. That's now turned itself upside down; we have a fairly robust set of regulations, but we don't have the competent enforcers and the resources anymore.'

Now, isn't it clear to you, and to me standing here, that, if we're going to cut council resources even more, they won't be able to get out onto the building sites, which they want to do? How can you be assured of the safety of residents if vital checks are simply not taking place?

I've taken a real interest in the evidence that your committee has received on this and I look forward to giving my own evidence to the committee next week. What I will say is much of the evidence that committee has heard only serves to reinforce the concerns that Dame Hackitt put forward in her report—so, issues about capacity, issues about the knowledge and expertise that there is in order to enforce and review and check that the correct safety measures are in place, and so forth, and even wider issues that I know the committee has heard about in terms of how can we make sure that what is designed and what is approved is actually what's been built. That has come through, I know, strongly in the evidence you received.

The First Minister asked me to chair and bring together a new expert group in order to advise us as to how we take forward those concerns that Dame Hackitt put forward in her review. So, how do we look at the concerns? Are they relevant to Wales? We believe they are. We think that the issues that she identified are as applicable in Wales and as important in Wales as they are in England, where the review took place. But also to explore whether her suggestions as to the way forward are the right suggestions and the right way forward for Wales—so, we need to be looking, really, at developing a whole-system approach that's coherent and complementary, with clear lines of responsibility, tight standards, monitoring and enforcement, and, of course, a real voice for the residents who live in these buildings as well. So, we're working to identify priorities, and I look forward to making a fuller statement on the work of the expert group in January, which will outline then a programme of work and a direction of travel going forward. But there's no complacency whatsoever in terms of how seriously Welsh Government takes building safety and the safety of residents. It's an absolute priority for us.

I look forward to hearing from that expert group, because I was sincerely disturbed by the fact that those council officers told us that they hadn't been out on site for 20 years, when they used to go out all the time. So, I would like for the message that you're giving here today to resonate throughout all the local councils here in Wales.

My third and final question is to do with the private sector. I've asked on many occasions what is happening in this regard. We know that you've given money to social housing—that's great and that's fair enough—but we know that leaseholders will be facing the bill, potentially, if they don't get support from Government. Some of these leaseholders may be on benefits, some of them have different roles and responsibilities in life, some of them just simply will not have the money to replace any cladding or any problems that emanate from those housing problems.

We've heard, again in committee, in evidence from Australia, that they have been able to get loans out and that they can pay that back through their council levy. That's happening in Australia at the moment. What schemes are you looking at so that we can help those people who are residents of Wales too? We cannot ignore the people who live in private housing who will need to be supported just as much as those people in social housing are.

Well, I would start off by saying that Welsh Government fundamentally disagrees with your assertion that it should be the leaseholders who pay for this. Welsh Government is clear, and has been clear throughout, that, actually, it's the building developers who should be responsible for the remediation work. And that's why I met with all of the developers and managing agents of the private sector high-rise buildings in Wales to ask them about their plans to remediate the ACM cladding issues, and to also make clear again the Welsh Government's position on funding this work—that we don't want to see the leaseholders left to pick up the bill. So, I'm pleased to report and see progress on two of the buildings, where work is either complete, pending certification or at an advanced stage and is anticipated to be finalised next month.

I also understand that further tests have been commissioned on ACM at a further two buildings, and, again, this is because we have a good relationship and a casework approach—we're being kept very up to date on progress there.

But I am frustrated, though, that, whilst plans have been drawn up to replace cladding on the remaining buildings, which are under one developer, action to do so isn't yet in place, and this is because of the financial complexities and the interplay between those interested parties. But, again, safety must come first and we've been very clear with them that we expect to see action soon. If there's not action taken soon, then, of course, Welsh Government will continue to liaise with the developers, but also with the relevant council and fire and rescue service on these matters, who do have significant enforcement powers should they be concerned about the safety of the residents.