We have to face facts here today. It was all very well and good saying that we are going to take the politics out of this, but we can't take the politics out of a political decision that has been made, and that is to serve a whole system that sees people in poverty, in abject poverty, those people who can't see their way through tomorrow, the next day or the day after—people who turn up in our surgeries or people who write to us saying that they really don't know how they're going to go on. And we can't pretend that that wasn't a political choice. It is a political choice. Austerity is a political choice. It was a choice in two parts, really. The first part was to deprive any money to the public sector, and it is the public sector that was providing the help to those people who found themselves subject to these drastic welfare reforms. So not only did the welfare reforms cut the money that was going into families week in, week out, but the cuts then also into local government, the political decision to remove the funds, which were running at 65 per cent of GDP when you took over and now are 45 per cent of GDP—that was a political choice. So, there is less money all round. 

It's an absolute failure. It's an absolute disgrace, and I'm pleased that Leanne Wood did highlight the things that she did—the way that people are treated when they can't get to meetings, the sanctions that have been put on them. Who could really think that it is a fair system to put sanctions on people where they have to turn up to beg for their money, and if they can't turn up to beg for their money, then they're not going to get any money? You cannot excuse that as a non-political decision, because it is a political decision. 

I do want to raise the issue of Age Cymru, the welfare reforms that are yet to come, and I thought I'd focus on that because clearly other people haven't been able to do so. We're talking here about mixed-age couples and their pension credit and housing benefit criteria, which will be changing on 15 May this year, and will be making those households in future as much as £7,000 a year poorer. And these are families that are already poor in their own right. So, what are these changes? Well, at the moment, the oldest person can claim, and does claim, the pension credit allowance, regardless of the age of the younger person in that household. What will happen on 15 May is that both people will have to reach that pensionable age, and let's be clear here: we are talking mostly about women, who will be younger than their men—it's not exclusive; we know that—and we also know that they've increased the retirement age in any case for those women. We also know, and there are examples that have been given here today, that some of those women might have been out of the job market for some time for various reasons. And there is another statistic that is well-known, and that is the PRIME Cymru stat that anybody over the age of 65-plus looking for work is more likely to die before they are going to find that work. And that stat is really, really well known. It's substantiated, it's known, and yet here we have a Government saying to older people, 'You will go out and you will find work, because, if you don't, what you're going to find is that you are going to have to survive on £143 a week, because we've removed your entitlement.' Unless, of course, you happen to split up. If you happen to split up, the older partner will actually get a top-up, and he will have, if it's a he, £163 a week. Now, come on, let's get in the real world here. This is absolutely outrageous. Whilst the Tories recognised and paid some lip service to not affecting older people because they might vote for them, they've even removed those thoughts now. So, we're going to put people, from the cradle to the grave now, it seems, in poverty. It isn't from-the-cradle-to-the-grave social assistance.