Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:33 pm on 15 June 2022.
Thank you for that question. Yes, we’ve rejected the WAVE recommendations, because we don’t think you can say you’ll only help 70 per cent of children and 30 per cent you don’t help—we want to help 100 per cent of children. So, I’m sure that the intentions behind the WAVE recommendations, I’m sure, are very good, but you can’t say you reject 30 per cent of the children—you can’t help. And so that’s behind our reasons for not accepting the WAVE Trust.
And, yes, we do have a duty to protect our children and that's why we are putting record amounts of money into social care, into social services, in order to support families to bring up their children and to support them in a wide variety of ways, because it’s absolutely crucial that we do what we can to support families and to support children to stay in families because I think we would all agree that the best place for children is in their families, and there are far too many children who are looked after by the state in Wales and we want to see those numbers reduced. And so we are putting in more help to protect children in families.