North Wales Assembly Member Mark Isherwood has today backed a motion calling on the Welsh Government to produce a tackling poverty strategy, budget and action plan and to drive accountability on progress made on the tackling poverty agenda.
Focussing on policies made in Wales, Mr Isherwood stressed that the section on Wales in the UN Special Rapporteur’s Report on ‘Extreme Poverty and Human Rights’ noted that Wales faces the highest relative poverty rate in the United Kingdom, that twenty-five per cent of jobs in Wales pay below minimum wage, and that although the Welsh Government scrapped a poverty-specific action plan and the post of Minister for Communities and Tackling Poverty in 2017, the Welsh Government’s new Prosperity for All Strategy ‘has no strategic focus or ministerial responsibility for poverty reduction, and lacks clear performance targets and progress indicators’.
Speaking in the Chamber, he said:
“Only last month, however, research Commissioned by the End Child Poverty Network showed that Wales was the only UK Nation to see a rise in child poverty last year.
“As the Children’s Commissioner for Wales said in March, ‘Welsh Government has a Child Poverty Strategy which outlines its long-term ambitions, but at the moment there’s no clear plan’ and ‘Welsh Government should write a new Child Poverty Delivery Plan, focusing on concrete and measurable steps’.
“Last October’s Equality and Human Rights Commission Report ‘Is Wales Fairer?’ found ‘poverty and deprivation still remain higher in Wales than other British nations; Wales is the least productive nation in the UK, and median weekly earnings in Wales are lower than in England and Scotland’.
“As they stated, ‘we can make a difference, but this can only be achieved with both a bold vision and a deliverable action plan’.
“February’s Bevan Foundation ‘State of Wales’ briefing on Low Pay found that both the number and percentage of workers paid below Real Living Wage in Wales has increased - with women, disabled people and BAME groups at heightened risk of being in low paid work.
“The Bevan Foundation calls for the development of ‘an anti-poverty strategy that clearly sets the steps that the Welsh Government intend to take to reduce the number of people living in poverty in Wales’.
“As Oxfam Cymru states ‘It’s not the case that anti-poverty strategies don’t work; it’s about how those strategies are targeted. The lack of a strategy denies the tackling poverty agenda a clear direction’. And as NEA Cymu states ‘the Welsh Government should designate fuel poverty as an infrastructure priority’.
“As I said in 2006 ‘all mainstream political parties want to tackle poverty. Social Justice will only be delivered by really empowering people to fulfil their potential and to take ownership in their own communities’.
“AND as the Wales Council for Voluntary Action said in 2013, ‘Welsh Government and the sector need to refresh current engagement mechanisms to develop, promote and monitor a ‘Programme for Action’ based upon co-production and common ground’. This means dumping any dead dogma, fully embracing social and business enterprise, and doing what works.”
Mr. Isherwood added “It is too easy to blame UK Government since 2010, but child poverty in Wales has been rising steadily since 2004 and Wales had the highest child poverty levels in the UK long before any change in UK Government and prior to the credit crunch. In 2008 over one in four children in Wales lived in relative poverty and 90,000 in severe poverty”.
ENDS
