Thank you. If our nation was one that was genuinely civilised, then the statement by the UN rapporteur for extreme poverty would be seen as a moment of awakening once and for all, I think. It should be seen as an appalling situation that a state as rich and wealthy as the UK is put on a list of nations that can’t look after its poorest. I'm afraid that the clear suggestion from the response that there has been to this statement is that the political culture of this state isn't quite as civilised as we might like to think it was.

I’ll try to put it in a language that everyone understands—I’ll talk about money. Not for the first time today, I’ll talk about austerity. We’ve heard the Conservatives arguing that austerity and cuts to the welfare state have been inevitable; they've been vital for economic reasons. It wasn't something that they wanted to do, but they had to do so. And what could be wrong, after all, with hitting the poorest 20 per cent because of problems with regulation in the financial services sector?

But even if you do accept that there was no choice but to cut public expenditure over the past decade, well, central UK Government policy has been a failure. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, for example, said that poverty cost £78 billion to the United Kingdom in measures to respond to or mitigate the effects of poverty. And that doesn't include the welfare state payment: £1 in every £5  spent on public services makes up for the way that poverty has impacted people’s lives. Crisis has modelled the costs of homelessness and suggests that if the United Kingdom continues to allow homelessness to happen, as it does at present, rather than trying to eradicate it, then public services will have to spend £35 billion in addition.

And think about the income that is lost in terms of future earnings to the public purse from the children growing up in poverty and failing to achieve their potential, and their parents using foodbanks, and going to schools that aren’t funded adequately and so on. And, of course, what we see that is of particular relevance to us is that Wales is being impacted disproportionately. In Wales, we have the highest levels of relative poverty in the United Kingdom, with almost one in four people living in relative income poverty. Now, in-work poverty has grown over the past decade, despite the fact that wages have increased. What we have are posts that aren’t good enough. A quarter of the posts—I’ve seen figures—are under the minimum wage, and what this tells us is that public services in Wales are more expensive to run than the UK average in terms of getting to grips with the impacts of poverty. And the way that the Welsh Government responds to this clearly isn’t working. I’d encourage you to read the evidence of Victoria Winckler from the Bevan Foundation to the Finance Committee on 25 October, where she was looking at the budget and failed to see where this budget showed signs of a clear strategy to get to grips with poverty.

We in Wales, we on these benches here, we’re asking why would we, why would anyone, want to be part of a union that does this to us and volunteers to leave things such as the administration of the welfare state to remain in Westminster. The people of Islwyn, yes, as in other parts of Wales, they can’t look to a Welsh Government that is trying to draw down those levers that would allow us to mitigate the impact of the policies that are being pursued by a cruel Conservative Government in Westminster. It’s Labour here that’s failing to seek those powers.

We’ve seen in other parts of these islands those steps being taken in Northern Ireland, in Scotland, and it’s time for us in Wales to say that we have to try to seek those levers—all of those levers—that could be within our grasp to get to grips with the poverty that is a source of shame for us as a nation. Plaid Cymru isn’t asking for the powers for the sake of it; we’re asking for the powers because people are dying and being locked into poverty.