Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd. Thank you, Minister, for your statement, and can I also thank you for your briefing this morning? I found it very useful in terms of understanding your viewpoint. Indeed, I acknowledge completely your view of investing in care leavers and trying to provide opportunities for them that others might take for granted, and I accept that this comes from a position of genuinely wanting to help. I further believe that every Member here would recognise that care leavers are a particularly vulnerable group that need additional support. The Welsh Conservatives recognise this and that care leavers face unique challenges and difficulties, and we want to do everything to ensure that they have the best care and every opportunity available to them. However, Minister, my concern with this UBI trial is that this Government is changing the narrative of universal basic income by conflating it with providing specific help for care leavers in the hope that, after two years, you will have data that justifies the roll-out of a UBI. This approach is inherently flawed, because you will not actually be able to extrapolate any data from such a specific and, might I add, vulnerable group to apply it to a full cross-section of society. Moreover, by using care leavers as your measurement group, I believe that you are diminishing the opportunity for rigorous scrutiny of UBI, because any adverse comments will be met with a counter-argument that the person making them is against care leavers, which is not only very unlikely to be true, but it will, overall, prevent many people from engaging with the scrutiny process out of a fear of a backlash.

Moreover, on the grounds of helping care leavers, we believe that giving them every opportunity to make the best of their lives is right, and we recognise the trauma and very difficult circumstances some of them have faced. However, we also have to be mindful that within this group there are some extremely vulnerable people with complex needs, and giving them £1,600 a month in theory may help them in the short term, in reality it could make the situation worse for them in the long term. Firstly, this vulnerable group of teenagers, some of whom come from challenging backgrounds, could become, without the right help and support, targets for people looking to coerce, abuse and exploit them because of the extra money. How will you prevent this? Secondly, as you have mentioned previously, we know that there are people within this group, although they are a very small proportion, that have drug dependency issues, and having such a large amount of money given to them, again without the right help and support, could worsen existing issues. And thirdly, the Welsh Government is ultimately creating a cliff edge for care leavers who will simply have their money stopped after two years. So, in reality, you are taking some of the most vulnerable people, creating a dependency on an additional income that they are very unlikely to receive ever again and then leaving them to fend for themselves after two years.

Minister, you mentioned this massive package of support that I have highlighted that they will need, but, in reality, this is not the case and the maths don't add up. You're providing £20 million over two years, which will only leave £800,000 to provide the support package, which is woeful at best, and, as mentioned this morning, you are relying almost entirely on the voluntary sector to provide that support. We have heard about the possibilities of people using this money to support higher education. While university degrees take, on average, three years, what you will be doing is not giving them the same opportunities that other people have had when their families have supported them, because you're only helping out part of the way, which I believe is irresponsible. With this in mind, Minister, what assessment have you done to evaluate the actual support needed for care leavers to maximise the use of this money, and what help and support are you offering to voluntary and third sector organisations to help them meet the support needs of those undertaking this trial? What assessment has this Government made of the needs of this group once the trial has ended, and how do you envisage they will be supported after it? With this being a voluntary programme for care leavers to sign up to, what specific help and support is the Welsh Government offering to those eligible to actually sign up and access this trial? And finally, in terms of universal basic income, how do you expect this data to be extrapolated to provide sufficient evidence that UBI will help the full cross-section of Welsh society? Thank you.