Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Local Government, Mark Isherwood AM, has called for assurances that early intervention and prevention budgets will be ring-fenced.
Mr Isherwood raised the matter in the Assembly Chamber yesterday with the Cabinet Secretary for Local Government and Public Services.
He said:
“This morning you issued a joint Written Statement with the Minister for Housing and Regeneration on the ‘Early Prevention, Intervention and Support Grant’. You spoke about planning, commissioning and delivering services which reflect the complexity of people's lives, and the inter-relationships between their support needs. You confirmed what the Finance Secretary said yesterday: that the Grant would be split in two, between housing-related and non-housing-related elements, with the establishment of a Children and Communities Grant for the pieces falling within your remit.
“You also said that you'll work in partnership with Local Authorities and wider stakeholders to take forward the new arrangements, and emphasised the importance of early intervention and prevention. Can you therefore confirm, or will you confirm, whether that funding will now be ring-fenced, as grants generally are, or will it be going into the Revenue Support Grant? If it's not ring-fenced, how will the Welsh Government be monitoring and evaluating outcomes to establish whether this money actually found its way to where it was intended?”
The Cabinet Secretary told Mr Isherwood that “we will ensure that those grants do have their own integrity”.
Mr Isherwood added: “Well, I'll look forward to exploring that further with you in the future to establish what 'integrity' means in that context.”
Mr Isherwood also challenged the Cabinet Secretary over action to address poverty in Wales.
He said: “In the middle of July, I went to a Wales Centre for Public Policy event in Bangor University, 'Reigniting Debate on Rural Poverty: Evidence, Practice & Policy Implications'. This emphasised the importance of the third sector. it highlighted a lack of integrated rural policy, an asset-based approach in line with the Well-being Act being required, the need to value the expertise and reach the voluntary sector and wider community through local empowerment and the Welsh Government's ‘LEADER’ approach, and identified a gap between policy and practice, with good intentions not followed through.
“Similarly, last week, you might have seen that the Bevan Foundation circulated a report from the Social Metrics Commission, which is an independent commission that has brought to bear thinkers from across the political spectrum to develop a new approach to measuring poverty. They tell us that the new measurement will have more accurate estimates of things like housing, childcare, disability, the length of time a family's been in poverty and so on, that 24 per cent of the population of Wales live in poverty, and a higher proportion of people live in poverty in Wales than any other UK nation.
“They say they welcome the launch of the new measure, and that the new measure provides a much more realistic and nuanced understanding of poverty in Wales. But how do you respond to their statement that this should be used to inform a comprehensive and practical action by the Welsh Government, local authorities, businesses and other bodies, such as those referred to in the Rural Poverty report I mentioned earlier, to solve poverty in Wales?”
In his response the Cabinet Secretary spoke of the importance of tackling poverty at its root.
Mr Isherwood added: “After almost two decades in office, it’s a bit late for a Member of the Labour Welsh Government to be telling us that ‘it’s important to tackle poverty at its root.’ I have been telling them that since I arrived in the Assembly in 2003. We now need assurance that they will ring-fence early intervention and prevention budgets, and that will require smart budgeting.”