Thank you very much, Dirprwy Lywydd. It's a great pleasure for me to put forward this debate on developing a rural poverty strategy for Wales, and I'm very pleased to give a minute each of my time to Siân Gwenllian, to Sam Kurtz and to Mabon ap Gwynfor.

I think the most obvious place to start is to ask the question, 'Why do we need a rural poverty strategy for Wales?' Well, for those of us who live in rural areas, what we see around us is a picture of decline—banks closing, schools, post officers, pubs, and so on, all closing; young people leaving rural Wales to seek work, to seek affordable housing, or a better life or better leisure facilities. In rural areas, in general terms, this is the picture that is familiar to everyone. Levels of income per head are lower than the average in Wales; the levels of gross value added and productivity are also lower. Taken together, the levels of deprivation in rural areas are lower than in urban areas. Who would think that Ceredigion, which has house prices that are amongst the highest in Wales, has 30 per cent of children living in poverty—the second highest rate in the whole of Wales. And what this shows is that the external view of relative wealth can hide poverty under the surface, and that, truth be told, is the situation in rural Wales as a whole: significant poverty hiding in the shadows, and invisible.

To add to this, the cost-of-living crisis has had a damaging impact on our rural communities. The Bevan Foundation has talked about the triple pressures on rural areas, namely high costs, low incomes and poor access to public services through a lack of support by Governments of different stripes. As Professor Calvin Jones from the economics department at Cardiff University has said: