Poverty in Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:23 pm on 12 March 2019.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:23, 12 March 2019

Well, Llywydd, I thank the Member for that question. On Monday of this week, I met with the Trussell Trust in Wales; it was a sobering meeting. Of course, the trust carries out fantastic work with the volunteers who they have recruited in many communities in Wales. But they said to me the pattern of use of their food banks is moving from being a crisis service, where they deal with families who somehow manage most of the time, and then every now and then are in need of help, to a chronic service, where they see families who cannot manage week in and week out because of the ways in which their incomes have been depressed and where the burden of debt, particularly, erodes their ability to meet even the most minimum of day in, day out needs.

As the Member knows, we have increased the funding for our own school holiday enrichment programme. We've been providing £0.5 million a year; we're going to provide £900,000 a year for the holiday enrichment programme this year. One of the things we want to do is to be able to move that programme beyond the school setting, where it has been up until now, so that it can work with others like Merthyr Valleys Homes, like the Caia community in Wrexham, where I met volunteers alongside my colleague Lesley Griffiths, so that we can provide that help in more settings and more places. We're very glad to do it. We're very determined to do it. It's part of our poverty-proofing measure. But to think that in a country that is the sixth richest on the face of the globe we are having to provide services to prevent children from going hungry in school holidays, that can hardly be a matter of celebration for any of us.