Item 4 on the agenda is a statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government—child poverty progress report 2019. I call on the Minister for Housing and Local Government, Julie James.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. This morning, I laid a copy of the Welsh Government’s progress report on tackling child poverty. The results make difficult reading. The headline figure—and the one I'm sure that Members today will all want to focus on—shows that child poverty in Wales has risen. This inescapable fact is something that should concern each and every one of us. 

In a rich, developed country like the UK, almost a third of children are living in poverty. It is a sobering statistic and a sad indictment of the inequality that has been allowed to take root across the UK over the last decade. There is no doubt that child poverty is rising in Wales because of the actions taken by the UK Government over the last decade. A decade of austerity cuts that have reduced the funding available for vital public services and a decade of cruel welfare cuts that have transformed what should be a safety net into a punishment system for those who rely on the state to help them in their hour of need. Reforms that have withdrawn child support from a third child, that have wrongly judged the disabled and long-term sick to be well enough to work, and created a sanctions regime that has driven unknown numbers to suicide. Reforms that have forced people to pay for having the luxury of a spare bedroom and have seen the use of food banks mainstreamed for millions.

Deputy Presiding Officer, when we look more closely at this report, it shows that where the Welsh Government has taken direct action to influence the lives of families and children throughout Wales, our policies are having a positive impact on the root causes of poverty and inequality. Our economic inactivity rate has fallen by five percentage points—double the rate for the UK since devolution. The number of workless households in Wales has fallen by more than 18 per cent. The employment rate here in Wales is now higher than the UK as a whole, and the percentage of working adults with no qualifications is falling.

The evidence shows that key Welsh Government programmes are making a difference by mitigating the impact of poverty, helping people to find and stay in work, and are providing support through the social wage, worth £2,000 a year to some households. But with 29 per cent of children in poverty in Wales, the action we can take can only ever mitigate what has become a deliberate policy intention of this and former UK Conservative Governments to increase inequality across the UK.

The independent Resolution Foundation has projected that by 2022, the UK Government’s policies will lead to 37 per cent of children in the UK living in poverty. This is higher than in any other period since the second world war. This is a shameful epitaph to be placed on the record of the UK Government. We won’t stop working to make families’ lives better in Wales, and we will use every lever we have to build greater resilience to support people and communities. As a Welsh Government, we can make a real difference to those families living in poverty in Wales, but we cannot undo this fundamental inequality that is being imposed on us from beyond our borders.

We will look again at everything we are doing as a Government—our activities, our policies and our priorities—to ensure that we do everything within our powers to support our most vulnerable citizens in these most uncertain of times. As part of this work, we have asked the Wales Centre for Public Policy to explore the case for the devolved administration of aspects of the benefits system. In taking this forward, we will look at the recent work by the Equalities, Local Government and Communities Committee about the future of welfare benefits in Wales. We've already started to outline some core principles for change, including compassion, fairness, dignity and understanding, with the aim of taking a more citizen-centred, humane approach.

I am leading a review of the programmes and services we fund to ensure that they have maximum impact on the lives of children living in poverty. This work will help to inform how we prioritise our funding to support programmes going forward. This review will take place alongside the planning of our budget priorities for 2020-21 through a poverty lens. Throughout the review process, we will ensure that the voices of those with a lived experience of poverty will inform the options going forward. It will also be informed by the findings and recommendations of a range of stakeholders, and through working closely with the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, the Bevan Foundation, the End Child Poverty Network and Chwarae Teg. 

We will take on board research and analysis by organisations such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Oxfam and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The final report will include proposals for a future programme of activity and a timetable for that delivery based on the recommendations, and I will make a further announcement once the review is complete in the spring.

It is more important than ever that we focus the collective impact of our devolved powers to deliver on our priority of tackling poverty. We know this will not be easy. I welcome this progress report, despite the difficult messages it contains. It sets out our achievements as well as the scale of the challenge that we still face in Wales, and shows the continued commitment of the Welsh Government to make a difference. Importantly, it will act as a benchmark for measuring our renewed efforts for ensuring that all children in Wales have the opportunity to live enriched lives and reach their full potential. I commend this report to the Assembly. Diolch.

The fact that child poverty in Wales has risen should, as the Minister says, concern each and every one of us. But I wonder if she could tell me why she states that the employment rate in Wales is now higher than the UK as a whole, when the latest figures published by the Senedd Research Service show that the employment rate in Wales is lower than in Scotland, England and the UK as a whole, and doesn't mention that those same figures show that economic inactivity was up 24,000 to 441,000, or failed to mention that Wales, after two decades of Labour Government, has the lowest wages across the GB nations.

You refer to the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee report about the future of welfare benefits in Wales. As a party to that report, I won't comment. I look forward, however, to hearing how the Welsh Government responds.

You refer to austerity cuts, well, my dictionary describes 'austerity cuts' as not having enough money, and, as such, that was an inheritance, not a choice. We know that, because of the actions taken since 2010, public spending can now begin to increase significantly again. Why do you instead champion the economic policies favoured by those high-deficit countries that tried to defy and deny austerity and ended up having far, far, far higher cuts imposed on them—exactly what your party's proposing at UK level now, in bigger interest rates and the sort of austerity we haven't seen here since the second world war?

Now, as I said, Wales has had a Labour Government for over two decades. Why did you fail to mention figures before 2010? Even before the financial crash, official figures show that Wales had the highest child poverty levels in the UK: 29 per cent in 2007; 32 per cent in 2008, even before the crash. In 2012, child poverty snapshots from Save the Children said that Wales had the highest poverty and severe child poverty rates of any nation in the UK, and in May this year, the End Child Poverty Network reported that Wales was the only UK nation to see a rise in child poverty last year to 29.3 per cent.

In fact, the UK policy matters—. Those are official figures, please check them. The UK policy matters you refer to apply, of course, across the UK, but only Wales has a Labour Government. You state that evidence shows that key Welsh Government programmes are making a difference by mitigating the impact of poverty. Will you, therefore, apologise, for example, for the Child Poverty Action Group's poverty facts summary published in May, which said that Wales had the highest overall poverty rate in the UK in 2018, or for the findings of the Joseph Rowntree report on poverty in Britain published last December that said that of the four countries of the UK—all of which had the same UK Government policies affecting them—Wales has consistently had the highest poverty rate for the past 20 years, not simply nine?

Wales, as we know, is referred to in many other reports. The End Child Poverty Network Cymru has been calling for some time on the Welsh Government to produce a new child poverty strategy with more ambitious targets to eliminate child poverty. In May, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Dr Steffan Evans, officer—. In an article for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Dr Evans from the Bevan Foundation argued that child poverty is still a significant issue in Wales and that there has been a 'Lack of joined-up thinking', whereby the Welsh Government's poverty alleviation policy has 'not been working in harmony' with other areas such as housing. And, of course, 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'.

Why has the Welsh Government failed to support calls for any appropriate plan, as debated in an individual's debate earlier this year? And how does she respond to calls by the sector, recognising that the Welsh policy levers that the Welsh Government has within its power are exactly the area they would like to focus their influence on, as they agree there are powers the Welsh Government can and should be using to tackle the root causes of poverty? That was stated in recent months, not a decade ago.

You state that throughout the review process, you will ensure that the voices of those with a lived experience of poverty will inform the options going forward. Seven years ago, the Welsh Government rejected the Wales Council for Voluntary Action's 'Communities First—A Way Forward' report, which found that community involvement in co-designing and co-delivery of local services should be central to any successor lead tackling poverty programme. And, after spending £0.5 billion on that programme, the Welsh Government then phased it out, having failed to reduce the headline rate of poverty or increase relative prosperity in Wales. As the Bevan Foundation said, if people feel that policies are imposed on them, the policies don't work, and a new programme should be produced with communities, not directed top down.

How, therefore, do you respond to the statement by Carnegie Trust in their latest report on turnaround towns that the enabling state approach, such as moving from target setting to outcomes, top-down to bottom-up, representation to participation, is the way of moving forward from the status of provider of welfare towards a more enabling style of Government, with a shift in the relationship between citizens, community and the state, where communities are best placed to bring a wealth of local knowledge and collective energy to the decisions that affect them?

Finally, how do you respond to the evidence available from the Co-production Network for Wales that we need to measure what matters? Their toolkit says that it matters most to the people that your activity supports that the people co-design as well as participate in the evaluation. So, how will the child poverty review lead that you're currently seeking to employ be seeking to apply those new lessons, or old lessons, to ensure that the needs that continue after two decades are finally addressed in a way that tackles the causes and not simply pays for the symptoms?     

Mark Isherwood asked me how I respond to a whole series of statistics that he read out. I respond in this way: the people who should be apologising for these appalling figures are the Conservative Government, who have implemented the most heartless, pitiless, merciless regime of universal credit that the world has ever known—[Interruption.] Let me quote you some statistics. [Interruption.] Let me quote you some statistics.

The current level of benefit is 12.5 per cent of an average wage. In 1948, when the welfare state was created by the Labour Party, it was 20 per cent. In the Elizabethan era, in 1599, under the poor laws, it was 16.5. So, congratulations, you have lowered—lowered—the standard of living for poor people in this country from where it was in the Elizabethan era. You are the people who should be apologising, not this Government.

This Government has done an enormous amount to mitigate the effects of a cruel and heartless Tory Government that has imposed a bedroom tax—a bedroom tax. How long after your child has died do you have to start paying more money on the room that they have vacated? How long? Do you know? No, I doubt it. How long before you accept that a woman with three children—three children—has to prove that she was raped to get support for that third child? How dare you tell me to apologise for anything. You should be ashamed.

I welcome the honesty in the statement that child poverty has risen and is projected to continue to rise. It's definitely the case that the social security cuts and wider austerity agenda of the Tories has been a big factor in this. There's no doubt about that. However, the Minister will also be aware that research by Loughborough University has singled out Wales as the only nation experiencing a rise in child poverty in recent years.

We don't accept that the Welsh Government has done all that it can. Indeed, there have been examples where the Welsh Government has made proposals that would have made things worse had they been implemented: the proposal to cut the school uniform grant; the reduced threshold for free school meals. Wales, of course, was the only country not to retain the family fund in its previous format, which saw thousands of families with disabled children lose out.

We can also point to the many committee reports that have made serious and significant recommendations for the Welsh Government to make things better. But, I don't really want to dwell on all of this. Instead, I have a number of questions, looking to the future. Given that many of the welfare cuts were started under Labour in Westminster when Tony Blair gave Lord Freud his first ministerial job, do you accept that you need to have administrative control over welfare if you are to seriously tackle the dishonesty of the Department for Work and Pensions when it comes to the assessments of disabled people, and to end the dishing out of sanctions like confetti?

Do you accept that you need to have a strategy for tackling and eliminating child poverty that includes smart targets and named responsibility for each action? And finally, do you think that you need to copy some of the legislation in Scotland and enshrine duties to tackle poverty and child poverty in law—duties that should be extended throughout the public sector and could, for example, be used to prevent schools demanding expensive clothes exclusively as uniform requirements, which is, I'm sure you would agree, scandalous?

On the administrative control, we have a report that we're awaiting from the Wales Centre for Public Policy. We have had the interim report, but we are expecting the final report shortly. So, once we've got that report, we are, of course, looking to see what that report tells us in terms of taking administrative control.

I share her wish to administer welfare benefits in a more humane fashion. I said so in my statement. We would very much like to see people who are entitled to benefits get them in the first place without having to go through the misery of an appeal and so on. But we also have to be very careful that, in doing that, we don't make the situation worse and that we are able to mitigate the sanctions and mandation system, which is driving so many people into despair in this country. So, I want to be very clear about what we want to achieve with that. And when we get the report we will certainly be sharing it with the Assembly and looking to see whether we can administer it in a more humane way.

In terms of a strategy, I personally have had discussions with the child poverty action group and the children's commissioner about what we mean by a strategy. I don't want to divert resources into collating something if it doesn't do something. What we need to do is make sure that our programmes are actually getting to the people who need them and that they're the most effective they can be. So, I'm leading a review across the Government of a whole series of our programmes to ensure that they continue to be fit for purpose, or whether they need to be changed, whether they need to have different targets. Because as the universal credit regime is rolled out, we need to hit a different tier of people.

The other disgraceful thing—I have to say an absolutely disgraceful thing—is the number of children who are in working households where they are still in poverty. Clearly, the universal credit system does not work. One of the things that people on the benches opposite never want to take any responsibility for is the level of local housing allowance, which we've discussed in this Chamber before, which has not been increased for four years, and which is driving huge numbers of people in the private rented sector into poverty as a result of having to top up their rent payments. The benches opposite could solve that tomorrow morning if they wanted to. They choose not to. So, there are a number of things of that sort that are very difficult to mitigate.

Leanne Wood will be aware that we are looking to make sure that people who live in the private rented sector have houses that are fit for human habitation, meet certain standards and are treated fairly by their landlords. These are the mitigation effects that we can do. Unfortunately, we cannot change the level of local housing allowance.

What we can do, though, is build a lot more social houses so that we can get people into the right sort of housing, and the faster we can do that the better. We're working very hard with councils right across Wales to get that programme running, now that we've got the Tory cap on the housing revenue accounts removed.

And in terms of the Scottish model, there are difficulties with Scotland. We're of course happy to learn from anyone who's able to do this effectively, but Scotland is encountering difficulties in what it's doing. We are very happy to learn from any country that's able to do this more effectively. The ones that are, of course, most effective are the ones that have proper progressive Governments, like those in Finland, where the tax system matches the need of public policy agenda. And that's what we would like to see when we have a Labour Government return to Westminster on Thursday.

Can I thank you for your statement, Minister, and the Welsh Government for its efforts in trying to tackle this issue? Because I think it is important to recognise the Welsh Government does not hold all the key economic levers in this situation, and that you've worked against that backdrop of Tory austerity that you've already referred to, and which as you rightly point out includes the callous welfare reforms responsible for much of the continuing scandal of child poverty, coupled with, as you've already highlighted, the in-work poverty of many working parents caught up in insecure low-paid employment.

Now, under the last UK Labour Government, contrary to what we heard from Mark Isherwood earlier, 600,000 children were lifted out of relative poverty, but under this Tory Government, to their eternal shame, it's now predicted that child poverty will rise to its highest level in 60 years. Indeed, in my own consistency of Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney, child poverty remains amongst the highest in Wales, despite some significant improvements in area like the Gurnos.

Minister, given that women are still the primary carers in most families and households, it's crucial that we tackle women's poverty in order to tackle child poverty, and to make sure that our policies are informed by an understanding of the gender differences in both the causes and consequences of poverty. And I've picked up a few statistics that I think help to create a picture of that situation: 46 per cent of single-parent households in the UK are living in poverty, and 90 per cent of single parents are women. And 27.8 per cent of females are economically inactive, compared to 19.6 per cent of males, and this is four times more likely to be because they are looking after the family or at home.

Women also make up 58 per cent of working-age benefit claimants, so any changes or cuts to benefits and any long periods of waiting for payments are more likely to affect women. So, tackling these issues requires all of us in devolved and UK Governments to work together. And if we're going to make real progress, we need two Governments pulling together in a common cause to tackle poverty. But I have to say that, at the moment, it feels like Welsh Government is spending to mitigate the impacts of child poverty caused by the UK Government's policies and battling a UK regime that clearly does not share the same passion or priorities. And I hope, like you, Minister, that that will end on Thursday of this week. In developing our actions against child poverty, can you assure me that the Welsh Government's policies are also gender informed, given the statistics that I referred to earlier?

Yes, I'm very happy to assure Dawn Bowden that we're looking very carefully at that. That's one of the reasons that the former First Minister commissioned the gender review, of course, and we're taking forward phase 2 of the gender review. One of the primary findings of that gender review, which is no surprise to any of us, is that income inequality drives gender inequality, which drives domestic violence and other issues. Until you can get women earning at the right level, without the gender pay gap, you continue to have those problems. Let's be clear, we know, across the world, what is the most effective way of getting people out of poverty, and that's to educate and pay women properly. And so the Government needs to step up to that plate.

With the welfare reforms that we've had from the UK Government, of course we've moved money from the purse, as they used to say, to the wallet. So, you've actually taken money out of women's pockets and put it into that of the male head of the household. That also drives domestic violence, it also drives a woman's inability to leave a situation that's intolerable to her, and it drives the rise in single-parent families, because the levels of personal debt under the current Tory Government have skyrocketed as people fail to make ends meet. And personal debt drives insecure mental health and insecure mental health drives relationship breakdown. And so these things are not accidental. This is a deliberate policy by a Government designed to make working-class people poorer, let's be clear, and all of the attendant problems that go with that.

So, we have Boris the Prime Minister who, as elected mayor of London, cut police numbers very substantially, and is now pretending that he's going to put it back. It doesn't actually make up the numbers. And then we're all astonished that we have knife crime rising. We slash youth services, but we're astonished that we can't get children to attend properly schools and all the rest of it. We cut vital public preventative services but we're astonished that acute service provision rises.

Mark Isherwood has the brass neck to quote statistics at me about levels of pay in Wales whilst supporting a Government that cuts trade union rights and refuses collective bargaining to a large number of workers. I would suggest very strongly that there are a number of policies that work in many countries around the world where we do not have driving inequality, and I would highly commend the British public to vote Labour on Thursday so that we can become one in their ranks.

Can I welcome the statement by the Minister? Far too many children live in poor households. Tonight in Swansea some children will go to bed hungry. Even more mothers will go to bed hungry. Some will go to bed in a cold and damp house. Some children will change their school sometimes as often as every year as their parents move from one short-term privately rented house to another. There are now more children living in poverty in working households than in workless households, mainly due to the prevalence of low-paid, insecure work. What insecure work can mean is that someone has low guaranteed weekly hours, such as seven or 10 hours per week, possibly in a shop you'll be visiting in the run-up to Christmas. Most weeks they will work between 30 and 40 hours at the minimum wage and be able to survive. If they go back to their minimum guaranteed hours for one week, then they have a financial crisis. They'll have to access the food bank and be unable to afford either the rent or electricity tokens.

I will again press the Government for two actions that I believe will help alleviate this hardship. The first is to build large numbers of energy-efficient council houses. That will get people out of the very expensive damp and cold privately rented houses, which will then be able to go back into the private sector and become owner-occupied again.

Holidays are a time of great concern to parents. If you talk to parents in some of the poorer areas of Swansea, the thing they hate most is the summer holidays. Ten extra meals per child per week are needed. I will again ask the Welsh Government to fund free breakfasts and continue the free school meals through the school holidays, starting with the summer holidays next year. This would be the one action that would have the most beneficial effect on people living in poverty, which far too many of my constituents are.

Thank you for those points, Mike. It's well worth pointing out that the level of child poverty across the UK has risen. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's 2018 report on child poverty, child poverty has been rising since 2011-12, which is an interesting correlation with the inception of a Government, and a total of 4.1 million children now live in relative income poverty—a rise of 500,000 in the last five years. So, I think it is clear that there are driving policies causing this.

Here in Wales we have a number of things that we're doing to tackle the inequalities that poverty brings. So, for example, since 2012 more than £475 million has been made available through the pupil development grant to support children and young people to reach their full potential. The school holiday enrichment programme has provided opportunities for children aged seven to 11 years from disadvantaged areas to be more active and, more importantly, as Mike points out, to eat healthily through the school holidays, develop friendships and make use of local school facilities during the summer holidays.

We are certainly looking at how we can extend the school holiday enrichment programme across Wales, because I absolutely accept Mike Hedges's point that a child that is hungry is not a child that's reaching its full potential. We're also supporting people into training and work, and our £12 million per annum Communities for Work Plus programme has supported a further 2,227 individuals into employment. But it's not just employment, is it? It has to be good employment. It has to be secure employment. It has to be employment that's not on a low guaranteed hour or, worse still, zero-hours contract. And for that we need different employment legislation at UK level. We need to make sure that people cannot be exploited and that, instead of regarding the people who are being supported by universal credit as the problem, we regard the businesses that don't pay them adequately as the problem, and we have a taxation system that properly reflects that. And to do that, we need a proper progressive Labour Government in power.

I'd like to thank you, Minister, for your statement here today. As you will know, Penrhiwceiber in my constituency was earlier this year identified as having the highest rate of child poverty in Wales, and I think that's a shameful indictment of a decade of Tory austerity. In the fifth-richest country in the world, there is no need for such suffering, but it's a suffering that's been engendered by the Tories' assault upon our welfare system.

I'd like to thank you for attending the round-table meeting that I organised in that proud and close-knit community of Penrhiwceiber back in September, and I know that you were impressed by the evidence presented to you there by community groups working so hard, often with Welsh Government money, to try and mitigate some of the worst impacts of child poverty. I know that those present at that meeting will be following today's proceedings carefully.

In your statement, you refer to the review of Welsh Government programmes and services that you're undertaking to ensure that they have maximum impact on the lives of children living in poverty, while recognising, of course, that most of the levers are outside of Welsh Government control. Are you able to provide us with any more detail on this, Minister, such as how the review will ensure that children's voices are heard front and centre? And will there be any focus on the impact of child poverty upon children's mental health? You will recall that we heard some quite startling evidence from schools present at that meeting about the mental health of children within that community, which I feel is closely linked to child poverty. What more could the Welsh Government do in this area?

Secondly, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified international human rights treaty in history. Do you agree with me, Minister, that by continuing to pursue welfare reforms such as universal credit, the bedroom tax, the two-child limit on tax credit, reforms that are scheduled to push an extra 50,000 children into poverty by the time that they are fully implemented, this inhumane Tory Government could be in breach of several articles of the UNCRC? And I refer in particular to article 26, which states that every child has a right to benefit from social security, a right that is currently being denied to the third or fourth children of such families, or to the children of those families who have to wait four, six, eight or even 10 weeks to access their first instalment of universal credit, and also article 27, which states that every child has the right to an adequate standard of living. What state have we come to, Minister, where the policies of the Government of the fifth richest country in the world could be seen to contravene this most important of human rights treaties, and what work are you and your colleagues in this Welsh Labour Government doing to impress the seriousness of this situation, not just on the UK Tory Government, but on the wider international community?

Finally, Minister, recognising that the greatest increase in child poverty is among working households, the very best way to lift children out of poverty is to enable their parents to access secure, well-paid employment. The excellent work of Communities for Work Plus and Parents Childcare and Employment has been widely documented in my community, but could you tell us a bit more about what other work you're doing with colleagues across Government to try and grow secure, well-paid employment opportunities within these communities most affected by child poverty, particularly within the south Wales Valleys?

Yes. It was a real pleasure to come up to your constituency and listen to a group of very committed people to discuss how we can get together and make sure that all of our policies hit the right people at the right time and how we can access them, and, actually, as a result of that meeting, we've initiated a number of actions across the Government to ensure that our policies line up nicely together, as it was highlighted there that we have very well-intentioned policies that don't always line up as nicely. So, that's one of the work streams that we're taking forward to make sure that people don't fall into the gaps between policies.

So, in terms of how the review is happening, over the next six months, we're reviewing all of the policies across the Welsh Government—it's quite a complex thing to do—to make sure that we know where they are, what they're doing and what they're supposed to do to ensure that we don't have any groups that are left out inadvertently as a result of that and then to talk about what we should do to transform them going forward. So, it's at that point that we'll want to take into account the voices of children and others, but we will be working closely with the commissioners and the human rights commission, Chwarae Teg and a number of other organisations to help us come to those conclusions, and also, of course, beside the Deputy Minister with the gender review, which is a very important part of this piece of work. So, it's about linking them together.

In the meantime, of course, we have a very large number of things that we do to support the health and well-being of low-income families. We have a £6.9 million Healthy Start voucher and nursery milk scheme, providing vouchers for pregnant women, new mothers and children under four from low-income households to get fruit and vegetables, milk and infant formula, plus free multivitamin supplements. I do want to emphasise that, because there are very worrying signs right across the UK of low birth weights in poor women, and we know that low birth weight has a massive effect on you for the rest of your life. So, it's really important to make sure that we get the right services to pregnant women to make sure that a poor diet doesn't affect the birth weight of their child and then its life chances. Isn't it appalling to be saying that, in the fifth richest country in the world, that that's something that we have to look at? Absolutely shameful. So, we are doing our best to make sure that we get those schemes out to the people who need them most.

Sixty thousand people are supported annually through the £126 million housing support grant to help prevent homelessness, because, again, high levels of personal debt and insecure housing drives people into homelessness—hidden homelessness often: not all rough-sleepers, but many people who are sofa surfing, haven't got a secure place to live, or, as Mike Hedges pointed out, are going from private rented to private rented very quickly. So, we have a whole range of legislative programmes designed to give people more security of tenure in their rented home and to make sure that that rented home is fit for purpose. And I will say at this point: to make sure that our good landlords that we have across Wales are recognised and appreciated and valued, I'm looking to put an awards scheme in for those very good landlords so that people can recognise who they are, and the managing agents that work with them, so that we can reward the good landlords and isolate those who don't behave in the right way, and our legislation will help us do that.

We also have an enormous number of other initiatives around a more generous social wage. So, these are cash equivalent services that have the effect of leaving money in the pockets of Welsh citizens. So, some families in Wales are around £2,000 a year better off as a result of things like the council tax reduction schemes, which of course reduces council tax liability for some of our most vulnerable households. It is very important to understand that we are really helping people with how much money they keep in their pocket. Because that's what you want: dignity, isn't it, and command of your own budget. One of the things that really annoys me is when I hear Tory Ministers saying that poor people don't know how to budget. They do know how to budget. My family knew how to budget. If they had to get by on what they got by on, they would know what budgeting is really about. 

We're also investing £104 million in the Warm Homes programme between April and March to deliver to another 25,000 homes of people on low incomes or living in deprived areas of Wales better heating. Because, as Mike Hedges has pointed out also, and I think you pointed out in your submission today, but it also came up in the round-table, if you're paying high bills to just keep your home above frost level and you don't have enough to eat and you're struggling to clothe your family, you're not in the best position to make the best of your potential and that means that you're not in the best position to look for work. This regime is actually stopping people being able to access good employment by not allowing them to put their best foot forward. It's completely the opposite of what we should be doing to assist people into well-paid work. So, I'll be delighted to work with you, Vikki, further on the round-table outcomes and with any other Member who wants to hold such a session in their constituency also.

Thank you very much, Minister.