4. What discussions has the Welsh Government had with UK Government Ministers regarding plans to cut universal credit from April? OQ56123

Llywydd, I thank Joyce Watson for that very important question. We have and we will continue to lobby the UK Government to maintain the additional £20 universal credit weekly payment and to announce this without delay. If they do not, many households in Wales—300,000 of them—will lose over £1,000 annually. This uncertainty is causing untold levels of anxiety for some of our most vulnerable families.

First Minister, I thank you for that answer, and the figures are indeed, as you've just said, staggering, with the numbers of people who would be subjected to this decrease in what is, we know, the very basic income that they need to exist.

I assume, of course, that the UK Government did predicate this change on some evidence that people needed an additional £20 per week just to survive. What interests me now is what evidence they might have provided to inform them that those people can now survive on £20 less from next April. I haven't seen the evidence. I just wonder, First Minister, whether you've seen the evidence that I haven't.

We know that this is an extremely stressful time for all families in all areas of the UK. It does seem rather inhumane to me to keep that pressure on those families who are struggling, in all sorts of ways, and the uncertainty that it is giving them that, in just eight weeks, they might have their funds cut even further, and the choices that they're having to make on a daily basis being placed upon them. So, could I ask you, First Minister, when you next speak to your counterparts in the Westminster Government, could you ask them to provide the evidence that they seem to have to reduce this very basic of incomes for the families most in need?

Well, Llywydd, I'm very happy to do just that. In November, the Chancellor said that he will be making a determination on this matter early in the new year. On 8 January we finally got a reply to a letter that the finance Minister here had written with counterparts in the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive back in November, saying that the Chancellor was going to wait for more evidence before making up his mind. Well, what evidence does he need, Llywydd? Presumably the £20 a week was a recognition of four years of freezing benefits for people of working age and the abolition of the family element of tax credits and universal credit. If they need further evidence, Llywydd, I'm happy to provide it myself.

I'll just for one moment tell you that my constituency office staff, as well as having spent the run up to Christmas having to give out food bank vouchers on a scale we'd never seen before, on Christmas Eve we were contacted by a single-parent family with five children who literally had nothing in the house at all with which to feed those children over the Christmas period. My office, like all of yours, people are working from home and they are having to do the very best they can in those circumstances, and they spent Christmas Eve running around trying to make sure that those five children had something to eat over Christmas. In the end, a fantastic local business provided them with the food they needed and we managed to get it to them.

But, Llywydd, I cannot tell you how angry it makes me that, in the twenty-first century, we have a system that leaves children here in Wales in that position. They were in that position not by accident; they were in that position because the family cap policy of this Government had left that family in that circumstance. It is a cruel policy—a cruel policy—that shifts onto children the consequences of parents' behaviour. I'm very happy to provide that evidence to UK Ministers when next I have an opportunity, and to say to them that those families need to know now—now—that they are not going to be asked to manage with £1,000 less after the end of March of this year.

The UK Government has boosted the welfare system by £7.4 billion in 2021, including the temporary £20-a-week uplift in universal credit standard allowance and working tax credit basic element. In common with the Welsh Government, the UK Government is keeping all its coronavirus measures under review as the pandemic position changes. As the Prime Minister reconfirmed last week, extending the universal credit uplift beyond April is being kept under review. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has stated:

'As the Government has done throughout this crisis, it will continue to assess how best to support low-income families, which is why we will look at the economic and health context in the new year.'

It therefore doesn't have plans to cut universal credit from April. However, given your devolved responsibilities, how do you respond to the calls by the Bevan Foundation, Citizens Advice Cymru and Community Housing Cymru for the Welsh Government to establish a single point of access for benefits and support schemes administered in Wales?

Well, Llywydd, the Member attempts to be an apologist for the UK Government in this regard; it does him no good at all. Keeping it under review is no good to those families in my constituency who rely on that £20 every week to put food on the table for their children. They don't need a review, Mr Isherwood; they need to know that the money is coming to them. Alun Davies asked me a question earlier, Llywydd, about the nonsense that Conservative politicians are putting around about the £1 billion that the Welsh Government is said to have and that we will use during the rest of this financial year. The Treasury has £25 billion in its coronavirus reserve. Why don't they make their minds up and tell those families who rely on it that that money is coming to them? That's what I'd like to see.

While I share some of the obvious and genuine anger that the First Minister feels about the way in which the benefit system affects people here in Wales, I'd like to put it to the First Minister that there is something that he could do for some of those families. It's estimated by the Child Poverty Action Group that there are about 70,000 children in Wales whose families are in receipt of universal credit and yet they are not eligible for free school meals in Wales. Can I ask the First Minister today, should the UK Government make the decision to remove the £20 uplift—and like the First Minister, I very much hope that they don't do that and that they provide families with certainty—but if they do that, does the First Minister accept that there is of course something that the Welsh Government could do for those families within its devolved powers, and that is to provide those children and those families with entitlement to free school meals?

I thank Helen Mary Jones for that question. Of course, it's an important one. She will know that the Welsh Government has led the way in making sure that free school meals are available to current beneficiaries through the school holidays, not now just until the end of 2020, but for the whole of 2021. The policy that the Member advocates is one that would have to be looked at very carefully. I'll give her the costings of it: if we assume that those 70,000 families had one child each, then that would cost us £33 million. If we assume that they had two children each, it would cost us £67 million, and if we thought that they had, on average, three children each, it would cost us £101 million. That is very serious money indeed in the circumstances we find ourselves in, and that money will have to be found from somewhere else, because there is no money sitting around in the Welsh Government doing nothing. So, I think there's a case to be made—of course there is—and I've seen it made by the Child Poverty Action Group and others. But I just have to put it to the Member that it is not a choice between doing that and letting everything else carry on; it is a choice between doing that and stopping something else that is undoubtedly necessary and important to many other Welsh citizens.