Rarely a day goes by that I do not regret the ending of the Communities First schemes in my constituency. Firstly, anyone who thought that a £30-million-a-year scheme would eradicate poverty was somewhere between hyper-optimistic and delusional. This is echoed by the evidence that Caerphilly council gave to an Assembly committee when we were looking at it. Can I just say that to expect a single programme to single handedly reduce poverty is naive and unrealistic? You will never eradicate poverty, generational poverty, by a single anti-poverty programme. It has been very successful at some things and not so successful at others, but, actually, poverty, fundamentally, is down to economics. Anti-poverty programmes and employment-support programmes are all well and good, but, actually, unless we have a robust economy, then we're never going to eradicate poverty. We also know that the first thing the majority of people who live in a homogeneously poor area do when they increase their income sufficiently is move. We have examples of that not just in Wales but we have examples of that in England as well.

We know the characteristics of poor communities: poor health; a high number of people on benefits; those not on benefits, which are more and more, on very low pay at the minimum wage, and more crucially with low guaranteed hours, leading to low and variable income, and many are going through serious problems this month as they were getting 30 and 40 hours last month and are now down to their guaranteed seven and 10 hours this month; general low educational attainment; few books in the home; with many a sense that things cannot get any better.

Where you have an area that is heterogeneously disadvantaged, then, to quote Welsh Local Government Association evidence to the same committee,

'if you look at the most disadvantaged areas, they've got the most parts of the system where intervention is needed, so they need a multi-agency approach, an intensive piece of work, to put all the bits back, and get them working again. In a more affluent area, where you've got pockets of poverty, the system isn't quite as broken, and, therefore, you need fewer interventions—more specific interventions—to help those people get back up and running again.'

Ynys Môn council said:

'The programme has reaped success for changing and improving individual people's lives by supporting them into training, volunteering and work opportunities and improving their life skills.'

To quote Swansea Council:

'Community based, accessible services allow staff to understand communities, building relationships and trust that support disengaged people to participate in and access services that they would not otherwise be able to access.'

Community successes: health; weight-loss programmes; improved-diet programmes; smoking-cessation programmes; exercise programmes. I hold the view that stopping ill health is more important than seeing health as a treatment system, which is what we do, we put more money into health and treat more people, but let's have fewer people needing treatment.

On poverty, a project looked to help people through reducing their utility bills. At a committee meeting this morning, we were talking about the fact that a lot of work has been done by Nest and Arbed in actually improving the buildings, and by the Welsh housing quality standard, but people are still paying a lot more if they're poor. As I've said on more than one occasion: it's very expensive to be poor. The amount that people pay when they have to put tokens into the system in order to get gas and electric is substantially more than we in this room do. In fact, I've said, again on more than one occasion: I have constituents who spend more money on heating to be cold than I do to be warm. 

We have projects sorting and recycling unwanted clothes. There's a lot of work, it's not just in Swansea, there was good work done in Denbighshire, as you know, Deputy Presiding Officer, in recycling clothes within schools. These sorts of things, they do make a difference to the lives of people. A project promoted a local credit union and getting people out of doorstep loans, and doorstep loans really are a huge problem for very many, many people; where someone comes and offers them money and all of a sudden it's going to cost them a huge amount in the end. Education and low educational attainment is a major cause of poverty. Projects prioritised improving education attainment by helping adults back into learning; family learning projects in partnership with local schools; parent and toddler groups aimed at increasing the development and learning of preschoolers; a homework club providing support to children and their homework. 

Society has got a lot worse than since I was a child living in a very poor community. I had access to everything anybody else did because I could go to the local library. No-one had better access to books than I did. Nowadays, you have people with their electronic devices in their bedrooms, when people like myself, if I was living there now, would have a two-mile walk in order to get to the library. There was also a scheme that encouraged a learning environment in the family and home.

Communities First was, in many ways, an excellent scheme, and it was a very, very sad day when the Welsh Government decided to do away with it without bringing anything to replace it on those things that really matter: improving live chances for those in our poorest communities.