Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:47 pm on 8 January 2020.
My time is very, very limited, I'm afraid.
Leanne, I think, pointed to the wealth of evidence that there is internationally on the value of cash transfer versus in-kind payments. There's a debate going on, of course, between the benefit of universal basic services versus universal basic income, the social wage that Joyce Watson referred to, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming that, actually, transfer payments from the state to low-income families are at the core of the creation of a welfare state. It actually makes a huge material difference to people's lives in all kinds of ways: it reduces post-natal depression; it reduces smoking during pregnancy; it actually keeps children alive because poverty is one of the key factors in the early deaths of children under one as well. So, it has huge positive consequences right across the piece.
I think that Siân Gwenllian reminded us that the failure that I referred to—the UK Government's failure to reach that 20-year target—is also a failure here in Wales, because, of course, that target was adopted in around 2003, it was dropped in 2016. I understand the context for that, but we have the opportunity now to grasp the nettle and accept that solutions are not going to come from Westminster, and we can actually, yes, take lessons from the model that the Scottish Government are developing, look at the lessons there and go even further than them in terms of the level of the benefit that we're talking about.
Of course it's right, as the Minister said, that the Welsh child payment cannot be a panacea. Yes, of course you have to take a comprehensive approach to poverty reduction, but all the evidence increasingly says that transfer payments have to be a central approach from any Government. And when we have a Government at Westminster that is not living up to its responsibilities, then we have to fill that vacuum, don't we? I mean, that's why we were created: for this very circumstance.
It was interesting, in the report, the arguments against devolution of welfare, some of them focused on the so-called 'social union'. Well, this is no longer a social union, increasingly; it's an anti-social union—yes? I mean, the kind of changes in terms of the benefit policies, et cetera, are taking us to the position, as we've heard, where we could see up to 40 per cent of our children living in poverty. So, this idea is actually part of the toolbox that is necessary for us now to defend our children. Because these children can't afford to wait five years for the election of a Labour Government in Westminster, or 10 years, in the worst case scenario that some in the Labour Party are pointing to, depending on the outcome of the leadership election, presumably. Look, those children can't afford to wait, they will have to live with the consequences of that for generations. We can make a difference. Let's look at the powers over welfare, but particularly this idea of creating a Welsh child payment, which will prove the value of creating this institution in the first place.