LAST month, Welsh poverty and inequality think tank the Bevan Foundation noted that the value of social security benefits is now at its lowest levels in decades.

This, at a time when levels of in-work poverty and inflation are at their highest, is driving many into desperate circumstances if they aren’t already there. Amid high costs and low temperatures, these are the despairingly loose threads of support to which people are clinging.

The Welsh government has been among the myriad voices contributing to the conversation around uplifts to various forms of social security. In October, along with the Scottish government, it called for a £25 weekly uplift to all means-tested benefits, including legacy benefits.

Welcome, yes, but a pittance in the grand scheme of things and an offence to the moral conscience against a backdrop of rampant corporate profits, austerity and public services on the ropes.

Offsetting their calls, however, is their noticeable silence around inflation-linked uplifts to many devolved grants and allowances. This includes Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).

For readers who may not be familiar, the EMA scheme was announced by Labour in 1998 and aimed to lighten the financial burden shouldered by students as a means of increasing the participation of those from lower-income households in further education.

Piloted in 15 local authority areas in 1999 before being implemented in 2004, it provided up to £30 per week for post-16 learners from families earning below £20,800, supporting those who would otherwise struggle to remain in education after their GCSEs. It has undoubtedly made a significant difference to those from working-class backgrounds, myself included.

EMA was, and remains, far from perfect, but it eased the educational disadvantage endemic to the experience of being working class. Its abolition in England under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition has had major repercussions on young learners from low-income households.

Its recent reinstatement in Tower Hamlets, spearheaded by Mayor Lutfur Rahman, is heartening and to be applauded, not least because of its place within a raft of policies which make real material differences to the lives of working-class people.

Rahman’s recently announced budget will help fund policies such as universal free school meals, universal free home care, bringing community services back in-house and establishing university bursaries.

Without falling into the trap of advocating for compassionate capitalism, we in Wales should follow Rahman’s example, grounding EMA firmly within a family of policies based on universalism and bringing services back into the public domain.

It’s easy to say that EMA having never left Wales should be cause for pride, but instead of self-congratulatory back-patting, we must recognise that it falls woefully short.

Indeed, if the Welsh government is as serious about tackling poverty and reducing educational inequalities as they claim, then using a portion of the additional £28 million allocated to education in its 2023-24 draft budget to revise and uplift EMA seems to me a good place to begin.

Since my election to the Senedd in 2021, I have frequently engaged with young people who are in receipt of EMA and one message emerges crystal clear with worrying consistency: it doesn’t come close to covering basic costs.

This should come as no shock. In Wales, the value hasn’t increased since 2004, and the thresholds haven’t changed since 2011, meaning that a family would need to be £4,000 poorer today than in 2011 to be eligible for the payment.

Even by the Welsh education minister’s admission, EMA should be at around £54 per week today, a £24 uplift from the £30 learners currently receive. This means that successive Welsh governments have cut the real-terms value of EMA by a third over the last 15 or so years.

Put simply, while it offers much-needed support, it hasn’t evolved to meaningfully deal with the current crises young learners contend with. This is why, alongside advocating for Universal Basic Services, I have consistently campaigned to increase the value of EMA as well as expand the threshold to capture more people.

And for good reason: the End Child Poverty coalition recently surveyed 476 young people about the cost-of-living crisis and found that a staggering 97per cent said that they thought this posed a significant problem for young people.

This echoes the conversations I have with young learners. Many are now using EMA not for its stated purpose of enhancing their educational experience, but for helping their families through this artificially imposed crisis.

We need to establish an updated body of evidence about how students experience EMA amid acute economic crises. I am currently undertaking work to capture some of these lived experiences.

The landscape has changed drastically since much of the research around the utility of EMA was published, and to ensure that EMA is fit for the times learners are living through, as strong a case as possible must be built and laid before the Welsh government.                      

Who better to help build that case than those with first hand experience? These are the voices that we must be listening to but which, all too often, go unheeded.    
     
Luke Fletcher is MS for South Wales West and Plaid Cymru economy spokesperson.