One of the things that majorly concerned us was that the one-off non-recurrent allocation of £117 million as a result of the UK Government's decision to give everybody a handout to subsidise the energy companies' horrendously raised charges has serious implications for how vulnerable families are going to survive next winter, because that £200 Wales fuel support scheme has been really important for a lot of people, and if that doesn't exist in the next financial year, then we really do have to do some very serious thinking about how we're going to enable families to survive in what could be an even more critical situation next year. So, we want to see some serious thinking on how we're going to do this, and we want to see that by this July, because it's no use producing a plan when you're already in the middle of winter. 

We think that the discretionary assistance fund has been an important mechanism for ensuring that those who are in desperate situations, which can be caused by either having to flee a domestic violence situation or simply by a washing machine breaking down—. These really simple things I think have been fantastically important for people, and the fact that it's administered by all the single advice fund agencies ensures that everybody can get access to it. But we have very little idea what the impact of this fund has been, and therefore we really feel we need to know who's benefited from it in which parts of Wales, which local authorities have been successful in promoting it. As budgets are so constrained in this year's budget and it's likely to be even more difficult in next year's one, we really do need to have some clarity over who exactly is going to benefit and whether the DAF is going to be sufficient.

I think one of the things that concerns us is that it is still very concerning that a lot of people do not know what they're entitled to. Only yesterday I was sitting with some families who were with children with special needs. They simply didn't know about the £200 fuel support scheme that the Welsh Government is operating, because their social worker simply hadn't bothered to ask them whether they'd got it, and that is an unacceptable situation, just as it's unacceptable for health visitors to say they haven't got time to help families to fill in the Healthy Start vouchers. On what basis are they not focusing on the ability of a family to be able to buy food that nourishes their families, rather than junk food that can kill them? So, we really do need to ensure that every front-line worker, whether it's the school administrator, the caretaker, or whether it's those busy health and social workers—it's absolutely essential.

I was astonished to hear Peter Fox say that the basic income pilot for care leavers was a waste of money. This is an invest-to-save measure. This is our collective responsibility. That's what being a corporate parent stands for. So, we support the invest to save in the Equality and Social Justice Committee, and I think the continuation and the increase in that money is very welcome.

I just now want to refer to matters that are absolutely crucial to the well-being of my own constituents in Cardiff Central, picking up on what Luke Fletcher was saying about the continuation of the bus emergency scheme, because Cardiff Council has informed me that ending the bus emergency scheme, rather than having that £20 million transition money, could lead to cuts of at least a third of all the routes, or, alternatively, less frequent buses on all of the routes. And it will also have an impact on its ability to deliver school transport to schools. So, this is a really serious issue. This was discussed in the Climate Change, Environment and Infrastructure Committee, and the Deputy Minister acknowledged that transport poverty was a really significant issue. You have to remember that, in parts of my constituency, over half of households do not have access to a car and at least 25 per cent of bus users have a disability or a long-term illness, so getting on a bike is probably not an option for them. So, I think that this is a very significant issue and something that we need to put much more of the focus on. We need to think 'yes' about eliminating food poverty, 'yes' to having long-term solutions to fuel poverty, particularly with the need to bring forward the next iteration of the Warm Homes programme, but we also have to look at transport poverty; it really does stop people getting to their job or their education.