6. What assessment has the Welsh Government made of the impact of the rising cost of living on people in north Wales? OQ58086

Llywydd, the cost-of-living crisis affects people across north Wales. Surging inflation, tax increases and a failure to protect incomes will result in a fall in living standards and put significant pressure on vulnerable households. We are doing all we can, within the powers we have, to provide support to them.

Thank you, First Minister. Households in north Wales are facing an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis through no fault of their own. Day-to-day costs are going up as inflation rises. With inflation at its highest level since March 1982, when it was 9.1 per cent, the solutions offered by Conservative MPs have been insulting. We've been told to get better jobs, we've seen a Tory MP say that people can't cook or budget properly, and we've got a Prime Minister whose response to a pensioner riding the bus to keep warm, all day long, because she can't afford to switch on her heating, was to remind us that he introduced the 24-hour freedom bus pass. I don't believe that they live in the real world, or that they ever have done. Does the First Minister agree with me that it's time for the Tories in Westminster to take this crisis seriously and offer protection to all those that are suffering?

The Chancellor of the Exchequer told us that it would be 'silly' of him—that's the word he used—it would be 'silly' of him to offer further help to people facing the cost-of-living crisis. As Carolyn Thomas said, you sometimes think—well, you don't think, you know—that these people do not live in the same world as the people who face those dreadful choices between whether they can afford to eat or whether they can meet other basic necessities. Carolyn Thomas said, Llywydd, that inflation had risen to 9.1 per cent. For the bottom 10 per cent of the population, the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that inflation is already 10.9 per cent, because they have to spend 11 per cent of their total budget on gas and electricity. That's the reality of life for far too many households in Wales, and it deserves the sort of response that only the UK Government, with its responsibilities, with its fiscal firepower, is able to mount.

Here in Wales, we go on adding to the repertoire of things that we can mobilise from our own resources. It's sometimes forgotten, Llywydd, that COVID has not gone away and that that has had a disproportionate impact on people from low-income households as well. Just in the last week, we have made 4,073 payments under our self-isolation scheme—a scheme abandoned in England, by the way—putting £2.5 million into the pockets of people who, by definition, are those who need it the most. In that same week, we've made 3,653 COVID payments—COVID payments alone—from our discretionary assistance fund, which, again, is a fund not available across the border in the United Kingdom, with another £260,000 finding its way into the budgets of households who need it the most. If we can mobilise across the range of things we have available to us, there is no excuse at all for the UK Government failing to deliver a windfall tax, failing to deliver a social tariff, failing to find ways in which general taxation rather than fuel bills pick up those social and environmental costs, failing to do so many of those things that energy companies and others are themselves urging the UK Government to do.