Labour’s command-control approach towards community engagement has left Wales with the lowest prosperity, wages and employment, and the highest poverty, child poverty and unemployment, amongst the British nations, an Assembly Member has stated today.
Speaking in today’s debate on Regeneration, North Wales AM Mark Isherwood said if the prosperity of communities across Wales is to be enhanced, regeneration schemes must, first and foremost, empower the people living in those communities.
He said:
“Having failed to understand, or ignored, successive warnings and Wales Audit Office Reports, Labour’s command-control approach towards community engagement has left Wales with the lowest prosperity, wages and employment, and the highest poverty, child poverty and unemployment, amongst the British nations.
“After spending half a billion pounds on the Welsh Government’s lead tackling poverty programme Communities First, misapplying the findings of the 2009 Wales Audit Office on Communities First, and dismissing the recommendations in the Wales Council for Voluntary Action report, ‘Communities First - A Way Forward’, at the start of the fourth Assembly - this Communities Secretary told the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee last month that the programme would not be replaced, that the record of its work in Wales’ most deprived areas had been mixed, and that the figures aren’t moving.
“As the ‘Deep Place’ Study in Tredegar found, ‘the community empowerment agenda has been increasingly framed within the co-production approach. Governance for resilient and sustainable places should seek to engage local citizens - requiring a very different perspective from the normal approach to power at community level, and dependent on a willing and open ability to share power and work for common objectives’.
He added: “Working with the Talwrn Welsh third sector network and the community branch of the union Unite, The Building Communities Trust is identifying the key factors in developing community resilience at local level - using asset-based community development - unlocking people’s strengths.
“As they say, independent community organisations are ‘well-placed to effectively deliver local services’, from social care to family support and employability. So let us join the thousands of Co-production revolutionaries working in the Co-production Network for Wales.”
Mr Isherwood stressed that housing is key to sustainable regeneration and said that “although there was no affordable housing supply crisis when Labour came to Welsh Government in 1999, they then slashed new social and affordable housing by nearly three quarters - and even last year, Wales was the only UK nation to see new home completions go backwards”.
He also noted that “it was the UK Government which opened the door to a Growth Deal for North Wales”, but silence from the Welsh Government on calls by the North Wales Economic Ambition Board for key powers to be devolved from Cardiff to the region “remains perhaps the greatest impediment to the Growth Deal’s success”.