Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:25 pm on 13 July 2021.
Natasha Asghar certainly identifies an important issue. The person in Wales who is least likely to take up their entitlement to welfare benefits is a single woman living on her own aged over 75. There are many, many reasons for that, and many of them are rooted in the gendered experience that I referred to in my earlier answer. They are women whose husbands have died, and they relied in the past on somebody else taking care of money matters within the home. So, there is a lot of work that has to be done to try and give those people the confidence to come forward to claim the things to which they are entitled. It's why we invest such large sums of money in our single advice service; it raised £42 million in unclaimed benefit in Wales in recent times, which shows that it can be done, even though it requires a lot of effort. With some older people particularly, you are dealing with issues of pride as well, and issues of not wanting to get tangled up in a system that they fear may leave them worse off rather than better off. Of course, one way in which older people in Wales can be better off is for the UK Conservative Government not to break another election promise and not go ahead with the triple lock on the rising of pension entitlement, a promise that they made a great deal of in the election campaign of 2019—a guarantee that pensions would rise by whichever of those three measures was the highest. Now it turns out that it's not convenient for the Chancellor. It wasn't convenient for him to pay international aid, it isn't convenient for him to pay universal credit, and now it's inconvenient for him to pay pensioners as well. People will draw their own conclusions, Llywydd, about where the values of such a Government lie.