24 minute read
An Equal Wales
This year, it has been more important than ever to deliver government services for everyone while ensuring we prioritise and meet the needs of the most vulnerable in Wales. This year we have gone further than ever to eliminate disadvantage and to ensure everyone in Wales has the support they need regardless of their circumstances, both now and in the future. We spent £10,929 per person on public services in Wales in 2019-20, which is 14% higher than the equivalent spend in England. Between 2016-17 and 2020-21 we will have provided local government with revenue funding of more than £25bn to deliver services for people in Wales, protecting local authorities from the excessive cuts seen in England. This figure excludes the further £1bn we have made available for local government services and rate relief schemes this year as part of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Providing essential support for children and families
The Welsh Government has always put children and children’s rights at the heart of everything we do, ensuring every child has the support they need to thrive. In 2011, Wales became the first country in the UK to make the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) part of domestic law. We were the first country in the UK to guarantee provision to all children eligible for free school meals throughout the summer holidays and we have now guaranteed this up to and including Easter 2022. The Child Poverty Action Group said children in Wales received the most generous cash alternative to free school meals in the UK during lockdown. Throughout the pandemic, we continued to offer important services, such as our flagship Flying Start programme, which benefits children under four who live in some of our most disadvantaged areas. Based on the latest data available (up to 2018-19), more than 36,000 children benefited from the scheme each year in this Senedd term, receiving help such as enhanced health visiting, funded part-time childcare and parenting support. We launched our Childcare Offer in 2017, providing 30 hours a week of early education and childcare to families with children aged three and four-yearsold, for up to 48 weeks a year. In January 2020, more than 14,000 children were attending childcare provision funded through the Offer. The pandemic has affected some of these services, but we have responded to this by delivering support virtually and by adopting alternative approaches. To ensure families had the support they needed during this challenging year, our Coronavirus Childcare Assistance Scheme has provided essential childcare support for 9,600 pre-school vulnerable children and the children of critical workers. We provided £1.6m of funding
to support childcare and play opportunities over the summer holidays, helping to ensure vulnerable children and their families had the support they needed. In recognition of the challenges facing the childcare sector we introduced our Childcare Provider Grant, as well as offering full relief from non-domestic rates to all registered full-day care providers until March 2022. We launched our Baby Bundle pilot to benefit the very youngest people in Wales and their families. Two hundred bundles are being delivered through the pilot, providing valuable support for parents as well as a ‘welcome to the world’ gift for children born in Wales. We also provided £3.5m to address developmental delay resulting from COVID-19 restrictions in children under five through the Child
Development Fund.
We have invested up to £2.26m this year to support children’s rights through funding for the office of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales and Children in Wales. This year we have worked in partnership with the Children’s Commissioner, Children in Wales and the Youth Parliament to hear the views of more than 23,700 children and young people during the pandemic, helping ensure our policy decisions met the needs of children across Wales. The Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Act protects the rights of children and helps to ensure that physical punishment for children becomes a thing of the past. It received Royal Assent in March 2020, and will become law in March 2022. By March 2021, we will have invested more than £1.7m in the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Support Hub, first announced in 2017 to provide expert advice and support on the impact of ACEs and how to tackle and prevent them. The hub has delivered comprehensive training to more than 600 schools and more than 1,100 housing officers. Training has also been given to some 300 ACE ambassadors, 140 Estyn inspectors and challenge advisors and 120 youth workers.
Support for learners of all ages
We have continued to provide high quality education and support to learners of all ages in Wales this year, from the early years to further and higher education. Education spending in Wales in 2019-20 was £1,382 per person, 5% higher than in England and we will have delivered an extra £100m to improve school standards over this Senedd term. We have continued to provide funding for free school breakfasts for primary school children, and our funding for free school meals over the school holidays includes an additional £1 per child per day to ensure children can have a decent breakfast as well as lunch across the year. We are continuing to invest unprecedented amounts – more than £100m this financial year – to improve outcomes for our disadvantaged learners through our Pupil Development Grant. To help families meet the cost of the school day we launched Pupil Development Grant – Access in 2018, providing up to £200 to some children to help meet the costs of school uniform, equipment, sports kit and kit for activities outside of school. Since its launch, we have more than doubled funding for PDG-Access to £10.4m. We launched the Whole School Approach to Mental Health in September 2018, providing counselling support for around 11,500 children in schools each year. We doubled the funding to £5m in 2019-20, including funding for the mental
health and wellbeing of the school workforce and emotional support for children younger than year six. We provided a further £1.25m for school counselling in response to the pandemic, which has helped local authorities to provide an estimated 14,500 additional counselling sessions reaching more than 3,100 more children and young people. We introduced the Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Bill in July 2020, taking an important step towards a new curriculum which will support higher standards of literacy, numeracy and creativity and ensure that learners are more digitally and bilingually competent. We have invested more than £650m on our 21st Century Schools and Colleges Programme, improving the quality of school facilities and transforming schools and colleges into hubs which can be used by the whole community. Over 90,000 learners across 176 settings have now benefitted from the Programme since 2016. We have continued to support the teaching workforce, including through an 8.48% uplift to the minimum point of the teacher main pay scale from September 2020. Initial indications show that more than 200 more students accepted offers to study to become secondary teachers in August 2020 than in August 2019. This has been a uniquely challenging year for further and higher education providers and we have taken action to provide stability for the sector including bespoke operational guidance. We launched the most generous student support package in the UK in 2018, and we are the only country in Europe that offers equivalent living costs support to full-time undergraduates, part-time undergraduates and post-graduates. Around 58,000 students are currently benefitting from access to our enhanced maintenance support. In response to the pandemic, we have provided £81m to support universities and students, including funding for mental health support and student unions. This also includes a dedicated £40m support package, announced in January 2021, to support students facing financial hardships and to help ensure that students can access high quality learning online
Essential services and support for everyone
which helps those in need to pay for essentials like food, energy and clothing. Since its launch in 2013 more than 457,706 awards have been made, totalling over £75.6m in grant funding to the most vulnerable. This year we made an extra £13.9m available through the fund as part of our response to COVID-19. We have now also launched our Self-Isolation Support Scheme, which provides £500 of support to people on low incomes who are self-isolating and who cannot work from home. This includes parents of children who have to self-isolate because of an outbreak at their school. As part of our response to COVID-19, our Essential Food Box Scheme in Wales delivered more than 2.1m essential food boxes to people who were shielding. The success of this scheme is built on our strong relationships with local authorities and other partners who have delivered work on the ground. Local authorities have been able to provide support for people who are shielding or self-isolating as well as maintaining essential services such as waste and recycling, supported by more than £500m of funding from our Local Government Hardship Fund. We have continued to deliver our Council Tax Reduction Scheme to help people make ends meet. Each year since the beginning of this Senedd term, we have given £244m to local authorities to fund council tax reductions under the scheme. This has resulted in annual council tax bills being reduced for around 280,000 households. Most of these households – around 220,000 – pay no council tax at all. To make council tax fairer this term, we have exempted care leavers from council tax until the age of 25, removed the sanction of imprisonment for the non-payment of council tax and improved access to discounts for people with severe mental impairments. We want everyone in Wales to have access to all of the benefits and services they are entitled to. Building on work done this year, we published our
Child Poverty: Income Maximisation Action Plan
in November 2020. The plan outlines practical actions we are taking now to help maximise the incomes of families living in poverty in Wales and reduce essential living costs. In January 2021, we commissioned a marketing campaign to promote awareness of welfare benefit entitlements and other financial support that people in Wales can access.
We are committed to funding information and advice services. From 2016 until 2019, annual funding of £6m has helped organisations to deliver social welfare advice to more than 80,000 people each year. Building on this, our Single Advice Fund went live in January 2020 to help the people who need it most to access quality-assured advice and support. From January 2020 to September 2020 more than 82,000 people received help from Single Advice Fund Service. The benefits advice services we provide have helped people claim more than £20m of welfare benefits, helping people receive everything they are entitled to.
Housing for the future
To help ensure that everyone in Wales can live in an affordable, safe and sustainable home, we will have invested £2bn in housing over this Senedd term. We have continued to make progress against our target of 20,000 affordable homes and expect to surpass it by March 2021. This year, we have delivered a further round of the Innovative Housing Programme, supporting the green recovery as well as investing in Welsh businesses and jobs. The third year of the scheme provided £33m of funding and delivered 600 new homes in 19 local authority areas. In November 2020 we announced a further £35m for a fourth year, which will deliver 400 new Modern Methods of Construction affordable homes, adding to the 1,400 homes funded by the programme to date. This includes an exciting project to build 100 new social homes across North Wales using Welsh timber. We published our Social Housing Building Strategy in February 2020, and we continue to support local authorities to build Council Houses with the number of completions increasing during 20192020. As part of the work of the Valleys Taskforce, in 2019 we launched the Empty Homes Grant to bring empty properties back into use across the Valleys region. The original allocation of £10m has been increased to £12m in response to demand. As of January 2021, there have been more than 500 successful applications, with each project including £5,000 for energy efficiency measures to ensure we are doing everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint and the energy bills of householders. This year has also seen a transformation in our approach to homelessness. We published our Homelessness Strategy in October 2019, outlining our ambition to end homelessness, making it rare, brief and un-repeated. We have used the strategy and the work of the Homelessness Action Group to inform our response to the pandemic. Our inclusive approach of ensuring no one is left without accommodation, has resulted in some 5,000 people being supported into temporary accommodation since March 2020. In July 2020, we announced £50m for the next phase of our response, to help local authorities ensure that no one in Wales has to return to the streets. This funding has enabled the beginning of a transformational step-change towards our goal of ending homelessness in Wales.
An equal Wales for everyone
This has been a monumental year in terms of both recognising and addressing systemic inequalities in society. The vital work of the Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted the overt and institutionalised racism faced by the Black, Asian
and Minority Ethnic community globally and here at home. We are committed to addressing this as a key government priority, and we have brought together an array of experts to work on our Race Equality Action Plan. The Plan, which will be published later this year, will set out comprehensive action to address the inequality faced by Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people and to create a fairer, more equal Wales. In response to the pandemic, we established an expert Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic COVID-19 Advisory Group to examine ways to reduce risks to communities which have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. The group’s work led to the development of self-assessment risk assessments for health and social care, and they are also contributing to the Race Equality Action Plan. Ahead of the Action Plan, we are implementing a Race Disparity Unit for Wales alongside further mechanisms to urgently address race inequality in Wales. This work builds on the Strategic Equality Plan for 2020-24, which lays out how we are tackling inequality and seeking fairer outcomes for all of our citizens, including actions on Fair Work and the learning from the 2018 Gender Equality Review. An an independent audit of how Wales’ past is commemorated, including statues, monuments, buildings and street names has been completed. It revealed that people connected with the slave trade are often shown without any accompanying interpretation to address matters of contention. The important evidence from this audit will help us take forward further work as we seek to honour and celebrate our diverse communities. We commissioned a working group to advise on teaching of themes relating to Black, Asian and
Minority Ethnic communities and experiences
in the curriculum. An interim report, focusing on learning resources, was published in November 2020, and the final report is due in the spring. The Local Government and Elections (Wales) Act‘, which gained Royal Assent in January 2021, will extend the right to vote at local elections to 16 and 17-year-olds and all foreign citizens legally resident in Wales, helping to ensure people of all ages and backgrounds feel they are part of Welsh society. The 2021 elections will also be the first time 16 and 17- year-olds can vote in a Senedd election. We launched Action On Disability: The Right To Independent Living in September 2019, providing a framework to address key issues for disabled people, promote equality of opportunity and improve access to support and resources. In November 2020, we launched a white paper consultation on a new fund to support disabled people seeking elected office, which will be piloted for the 2021 Senedd elections. Our Employability Plan, published in 2018, contains a commitment to promote employability for disabled people, and we are employing a network of disabled people employment champions across Wales to work with businesses to improve access and opportunities. We are aware of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on the lives of disabled people in Wales. We have commissioned a report, due in the next few months, which will help us to understand the full extent of this impact and outline options for a better way forward for disabled people in areas such as health, care services, education and the economy. As part of our response to the crisis we have funded a £3m scheme to make 600 laptops available for disabled people through local authorities, and more than 10,000 disabled people have received employability mentoring support. Since the Violence Against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (VAWDASV) Act was implemented in 2015, we have helped more than 156,300 people through our 24/7 Live Fear Free helpline and delivered training and education on VAWDASV to 180,000 professionals and 154,000 children. This year we piloted our National Survivor Engagement Panel, supporting 12 survivors to inform our forthcoming National Strategy, and published new good practice guidance to help non-specialist public service staff work more effectively with perpetrators.
Providing support to people affected by VAWDASV has been particularly crucial this year, and we have provided an additional £1.5m for vital support services. Live Fear Free continues to provide support by call, text, live chat, and email 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The launch of our Home Should Not Be A Place Of Fear campaign in May 2020 led to a 10% month-on-month increase in contact with the helpline, including a 94% increase in live chat support.
We have continued to prioritise the needs of older people, including through our work with the Ministerial Advisory Forum on Ageing. This year we asked Age Cymru and other stakeholders to gather the voices of more than 1,000 older people in Wales, helping us understand their experiences of the pandemic and their thoughts about how Wales can prepare for the future. This has fed into Age Friendly Wales, our strategy for an ageing society, which has been published for consultation. We provided £3.1m of funding through our Period Dignity Grant, ensuring there are free sanitary products available in every school and college in Wales and we are developing a Period Dignity Strategy Action Plan for Wales to tackle stigma and to bring period poverty to an end. We have continued to press forward on LGBT+ issues. In July 2020 Ministers published a joint statement setting out our support for Wales’ trans communities and the right of trans people to self-identify. We believe that trans women are women, trans men are men and that non-binary identities are valid. In December 2020 we made the decision to lift the ban on men who have sex with men donating blood, moving towards a more individualised assessment which should be implemented this year. We are developing an LGBT+ action plan to build on the progress we have made and to further safeguard the rights of the LGBT+ community. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, we have maintained our support for key events such as
Windrush Day, White Ribbon Day, International
Day of Older Persons, Pride Cymru and Armistice Day. Looking forward, we have also continued to lay the foundations for enacting the Socio-Economic Duty, which will come into force in March 2021. It will improve outcomes for people experiencing economic disadvantage, supporting the most vulnerable for generations to come.
This year has been incredibly challenging for everyone involved in health and social care, and we remain incredibly thankful for the bravery, professionalism and kindness of staff across Wales. Despite the challenges of the pandemic we have continued to deliver crucial health and social care services. Digital transformation has played a key role in helping us maintain services. More than 100,000 video consultations have taken place across the NHS Wales Video Consultation Service as of January 2021, providing access to to GPs and medical professionals throughout the pandemic. Over 12,500 users have been enabled for the Service and 207 care home teams have been trained to use the programme. To ensure everyone can access the health services they need, and to maintain crucial family connections, Digital Communities Wales has provided more than 1,000 IT devices to more than 580 care homes.
In 2018, two years earlier than planned, we doubled the capital limit for residential care to £50,000 – the most generous level in the UK. We maintained the cap on charges for care services that people get in their own homes to a maximum of £100 a week so there is fairness across Wales. People on low incomes pay much less or nothing at all for their home support services. Social care has played a particularly crucial role this year, helping people live independent lives and reducing pressure on the NHS. We have provided a £500 payment for social care workers to reflect the incredible contribution the social care workforce has made during the pandemic. We also delivered our Care Homes Action Plan, setting out the
rapid action we have taken to support care homes through this extraordinary period. We have now published a consultation document on Rebalancing Care and Support, which outlines how we intend to improve social arrangements further and strengthen partnership arrangements to improve the wellbeing of people across Wales. The Integrated Care Fund has continued to deliver integrated health and social care services across Wales. In 2019-20, the fund supported projects to provide care at or close to home, promote self-help and to integrate health and care services to support children and adults with complex needs. It has been an essential part of our response to COVID-19, supporting 56 projects to reduce the urgent pressures on our hospitals. Innovative services such as our Choose Pharmacy Common Ailments Scheme have also helped to relieve pressure on frontline health services.
Unpaid carers make a vital and often unrecognised contribution and we have acknowledged that by promoting a Carers’ Rights Awareness campaign and launching a new National Carers Plan to get better services for carers. We continue to fund three major charities for carers with over £3m in grants and another £1m to support hardship claims. The Third Sector Covid-19 Response Fund has also helped boost local support for unpaid carers.
Building the health and social care service of the future
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, we have continued to work towards creating an integrated, preventative and supportive health and social care service as set out in our landmark A Healthier Wales strategy published in 2018. In 2019-20, spending per person on Health and Social Services in Wales was £3,190, 9% higher than in England. Between 2015-16 and 2019-20, Health and Social Services spend per person in Wales increased by 9% in real terms, a bigger increase than in either England or Scotland, and we will have invested £37bn in our Welsh NHS over this Senedd term to improve these vital services for everyone in Wales. We have continued to deliver our unique Single Cancer Pathway, which has provided a more accurate way of reporting on cancer performance since 2019. It is an ambitious platform for transforming cancer care, helping the clinical community come together to agree on new optimised pathways for cancer care.
Our innovative New Treatment Fund, which launched in 2017, has provided more than 260 life-improving and life-saving new treatments, reducing the average time it takes for newlyapproved medicines and treatments to become available to patients. Health boards are now making medicines, which are newly approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence or All Wales Medicines Strategy Group, available in an average of 13 days. Since 2016-17, we have increased the ring-fenced mental health budget by 12.5% to more than £700m in 2020-21 – it is the single largest area of spending in the NHS budget. We published a revised Together for Mental Health Delivery Plan for 2019-22 in January 2020, outlining the cross-government action we are taking to improve the mental health and wellbeing of people in Wales. We have significantly reduced the number of children and young people waiting longer than four weeks to access treatment, tackled the stigma around mental health through our Time To Change campaign and reduced mental health hospital admissions through an emphasis on more support in the community. We have also implemented new community perinatal mental health services in all areas of Wales with in-patient provision being available from Spring 2021. We have launched the Mental Health Crisis Care Concordat to improve the multiagency response to people in mental health crisis. In response to the pandemic, we provided additional funding to maintain essential mental health services and provide support for people when they need it. We have helped over 8,000 people during the pandemic with new online and telephone based support for low level mental health issues. A new Cabinet post, the Minister for
Mental Health, Wellbeing and Welsh Language
has been created to strengthen our commitment to building good mental health and resilience and treating mental illness. We allocated an additional £10m this year for Primary Care Clusters, giving clusters a total of £20m each year to invest to meet the specific health and wellbeing needs in their areas. We extended the HPV vaccine to boys in the 2019-20 academic year, providing additional protection against oral and throat cancers. We have completed five Integrated Community Health and
Social Care Centre projects this term, improving and modernising primary care environments across Wales. We announced an extra £4.7m to redevelop and expand the All Wales Adult Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Centre at University Hospital Llandough, increasing the number of beds available and supporting improved facilities. We provided £1.5m for a new Children’s Therapy Centre in Cardiff, which will help the charity Cerebral Palsy Cymru to provide specialist physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech and language therapy to around 100 more children from across Wales. We have delivered a £9.71m scheme providing a new seven-bed Transitional Care and Special Care Baby Unit in Singleton Hospital, Swansea to improve the quality of care for mothers and babies. We introduced the minimum unit price of alcohol in 2020, tackling harmful drinking and protecting the health of the Welsh population. We launched our Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales strategy in 2019, which takes a preventative approach to reducing obesity and promoting healthier choices, building on the seventeen Healthy and Active Fund projects. We published our first ever Loneliness and Social Isolation Strategy in 2020 to create a more inclusive and connected society, helping people across Wales build stronger social connections and improve their health and wellbeing.
Investing in health and social care staffing
Our staff are the backbone of our health and care services, and we are immensely thankful for the incredible skill, bravery and compassion they have shown this year. Over the past five years, nurse training places have increased by 72% and training places for midwives have increased by 97% With the support of the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic COVID-19 Advisory Group, we developed and implemented the COVID-19 Workforce Risk Assessment Tool to safeguard, support and empower our workforce. We extended our Health for Health Professionals Scheme to provide independent support to all NHS staff during the pandemic. We launched our Health and Social Care Workforce Strategy in October 2020, which sets out a long-term vision for how we will value, motivate and develop our staff. The effective provision of social care depends on the quality of the social care workforce. In 2015, we announced that all domiciliary care workers in social care will be registered, implementing this in April 2020. More than 21,500 domiciliary care workers have registered, showing that they have the skills to provide good care and support to people in Wales. In 2020-21, we provided an additional £40m to address workforce pressures in core social services, recognising the demand on the sector and the importance of effective staffing. We have increased funding to support health
professional education and training in Wales
for the sixth consecutive year, providing a record level of £208.90m for education and training programmes. In 2021-22 we will increase this by a further 8.3% to £227.9m. We also launched the Allied Health Professions Framework, recognising the value of staff such as paramedics, radiographers and occupational therapists and helping them improve outcomes for patients. We have extended the NHS Wales Bursary until 2022-23, supporting the next generation of Welsh NHS staff. We announced our plans to extend the Nurse Staffing (Wales) Act to include paediatric inpatient wards by April 2021, helping ensure there are more nurses in more settings in Wales. Two hundred GP trainees were recruited in 2020, well above targets and an increase of 7% from 2019. The Train Work Live campaign, which launched in 2016, has helped us recruit record numbers of GPs for three years running.
