Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:40 pm on 19 June 2019.
Child poverty in Wales has been rising since 2004. It had already reached the highest level in the UK before the credit crunch, when more than one in four children in Wales were living in poverty, with 90,000 in severe poverty. We know that, last month, the End Child Poverty Network stated that Wales was the only UK nation to see a rise in child poverty last year and, although the Children's Commissioner for Wales said in March that the Welsh Government should write a new child poverty delivery plan focusing on concrete and measurable steps, the Welsh Government failed to support calls for any tackling poverty strategy during the individual Member's debate calling for this two weeks ago here. How, therefore, do you respond to the representations made to me after that debate by sector representatives regarding my emphasis on the need to focus on Welsh policy levers that the Welsh Government has within its power, that 'This is exactly the area in which we would like to focus our influencing as we agree there are powers the Welsh Government can and should be using to tackle the root causes of poverty', i.e. within a plan or strategy rather than a generic approach, which has left us at the bottom for more than 10 years?