Child Poverty

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:43 pm on 19 June 2019.

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Photo of Hannah Blythyn Hannah Blythyn Labour 2:43, 19 June 2019

The Member's absolutely right that one child living in poverty is one child too many, particularly in 2019. That should not be the case, and I share the Member's passion for tackling this. On a Welsh Government level, we are committed to using all those levers at our disposal, as I just said to Mark Isherwood, whether that's through what we can do in terms of education, supporting childcare—. And that is a commitment that the Minister is taking forward—my colleague the Minister Julie James—in terms of actually how we maximise that funding and those things to actually bring it together across Government and really have the impact we want in terms of minimising and reducing and ultimately eliminating child poverty.

The Member refers to welfare reform and the potential devolution of the administration of welfare reform. This is something that I'm taking forward on behalf of the First Minister. We've tasked the Wales Centre for Public Policy to do a piece of work on that with us. I will be meeting them in the next couple of weeks to take that forward, and I'm more than happy to keep the Member updated, because I know you're so passionate and interested in this area, and to speak to you about this in the future.