1. What resources have been allocated in the Welsh Government's 2021-22 budget to help people with adverse childhood experiences in Wales? OQ56620

Our budget supports a range of investments preventing adverse childhood experiences, but we allocated £1 million for 2021-22 on targeted support. Half will support the ACE support hub for Wales and the other half will support activity to prevent, tackle and mitigate the impact of ACEs, particularly at a community level.

Can I thank the Minister for that answer and the support to date? This has been an extremely difficult 18 months for children across Wales. However, the difference in how children have experienced the pandemic will be stark. It's obvious to me that children who have experienced multiple adverse childhood experiences will have faced further challenges not seen by many of their peers. There is significant work already done to establish that this trauma will have a lifelong impact. There are good examples of where trauma-informed approaches to support these children can pay a real dividend. Minister, can I ask you, therefore, what consideration has the Welsh Government given to significantly increasing the amount of money spent on tackling and preventing ACEs?

Thank you for raising this really important issue, and I know that it's of key concern to my colleagues the Minister for Health and Social Services and her team in particular. The 2021-22 budget does include a further £0.5 million to support work to prevent, tackle and mitigate the impact of adverse childhood experiences, and this is on top of the previous funding. Decisions about how this particular amount will be allocated will be informed by the work that is currently being undertaken by the ACE support hub that's seeking to map the existing provision. And the ACEs expert task and finish group will also contribute to that work, to help us take forward the findings of the Welsh Government's ACEs policy review. So, advice, I know, is currently being prepared for my colleagues, and that will be presented to them before the end of August 2021, in order to identify how best to use that particular additional funding.

Minister, whilst I welcome any resources set aside to help those with adverse childhood experiences, it's abundantly clear that Wales is not doing enough to limit adversity in the first place. We know that, although poverty is not an ACE in and of itself, poverty is an additional stressor that can lead to neglect or abuse of a child. Sadly, nearly 30 per cent of our children live in poverty, and the Welsh Government totally failed to meet their target of eliminating child poverty by 2020. Minister, what is your Government going to do to tackle childhood poverty, and when will you meet your elimination target? Thank you very much.

Well, in our Welsh Government budget, we set out a wide range of activities that we'll be undertaking in order to tackle and prevent child poverty. You'll have seen our additional funding for free school meals, for example, and Wales was, of course, the first country in the UK to announce that free school meals would be extended right the way through the school holidays, until Easter 2022. And we're currently undertaking a piece of work to look further at free school meals and our policy there, to ensure that we are encapsulating those children who need it most.

You'll understand as well that we've been looking at what more we can do in terms of our pupil development grant access scheme, to widen that out to a wider number of children and families here in Wales. So, we're looking at the schemes that we currently have and what else we can be doing in this particular important area. And, as you say, poverty in and of itself is not one of the adverse childhood experiences that we think of when we talk about ACEs, but it certainly is an absolutely key issue that we have to tackle alongside ACEs.