Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:41 pm on 30 November 2021.
Well, Llywydd, I've explained previously on the floor of the Senedd that, as far as child poverty is concerned, the devolution period can be very easily divided into two periods. In the first period, the first decade, with a Labour Government at Westminster working with a Labour Government here, child poverty fell year after year during that period. It is in the last 10 years, with her Government in charge at Westminster, that we have seen child poverty grow not just here in Wales, but across the whole of the United Kingdom. Their latest and most cruel measure being to deprive children in families dependent on universal credit from that extra £20 a week on which they depended. If you want to know why child poverty has risen across the United Kingdom, then you simply have to look at the direct and deliberate actions that her party has taken while it has been in Government.
And I entirely reject what the Member said in opening. It's always been the Tory party policy that services should be reserved for poor people, and yet we know perfectly well what that leads to: services reserved for poor people quickly become poor services. We rely, wherever we can, on universal services in which everybody has a stake, and everybody wants those services to be as good as they possibly can be. And where there are millionaires, the tax system is there to deal with them to make sure that, if they get the benefit, as I would wish them to, of universal services, they pay that money back through the tax system to go on supporting others. That is the way, Llywydd, in which to make sure that children in poor families are not just separated off from the rest of society and made the beneficiaries of the benign concern of the Conservative Party, but to make sure that they are properly included with every other child in everything that we would wish to see a child in Wales have as part of their citizenship.