Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:49 pm on 12 March 2019.
I think the Member needs to be careful in the way that he deploys figures, because the evidence of falling life expectancy is very recent, and I don't think that you would sensibly project trends into a 90-year future on the basis of what we know so far.
But I want to agree with the basic premise of what Adam Price has said. Of course, poverty has a shaping impact on people's lives, and that is why we are determined as a Government to do everything we can to address the circumstances of people who live in poverty, and to use the levers that are in the hands of the Welsh Government to make a difference wherever we can. And that's something that we have been doing since the start of the devolution era and which we are determined to go on doing, even in the very constraining circumstances that austerity puts on our ability to fund all the public services to the extent that we know those services ideally would require.