The multimillion-pound Communities First scheme offers a crucial lifeline to many in the country’s most deprived areas. Getting rid of it would be a body blow

In a small room in a two-storey pebbledash building on a cul-de-sac in Neath, south Wales, eight people are poring over worksheets, children’s dictionaries and cookbooks. Split into pairs, the group, in their 40s and 50s, are reading short passages aloud, discussing them, and spelling out words they find difficult. The adult literacy class is run as part of the Communities First scheme: a £300m anti-poverty initiative launched in Wales in 2001, which, in 52 local “clusters”, provides a range of services for local residents, from health advice and support, to parenting classes and new skills workshops.

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But in mid-October, Carl Sargeant, the Welsh government’s communities secretary, said he “was minded to phase out” the flagship scheme and wanted a “new approach to meet the challenges of the future”, stating “Communities First was launched 15 years ago, and has supported many people in some of our most deprived communities. In that time, however, our economy and society have been through huge changes.” Sargeant said that funding would be redirected to focus on the most deprived, and has launched an online questionnaire to gather the views of Welsh residents. The move comes at a time when towns like Neath fear losing vital funding in the aftermath of Brexit.

For Val Davies, the announcement was a devastating blow. The 48-year-old came to the scheme two years ago, after fleeing her abusive partner and going into hiding. “I left school and I couldn’t read or write – so the state let me down then. And the jobcentre couldn’t help me at all. This is the only place that has helped – and now it’s closing, they’re letting me down again.”

People find Communities First either through referrals from jobcentres, GPs or the Citizens Advice Bureau, through word of mouth, or through advertised drop-in activities. As well as classes and activities, it runs a busy welfare rights advice drop-in that has helped many people claim benefits they are entitled to and fill in the necessary forms, and informs people of their rights at work.

The public understand Communities First because it’s being delivered direct to them – not through bureaucratic layers

Volunteers are crucial to Communities First: in Neath, more than 300 are involved with the scheme, many of whom are unemployed and came to the scheme for help, before getting involved in teaching skills, or gaining experience to work in the voluntary sector. David Edwards, Neath Communities First cluster manager, says it has 25-30 volunteers working on the scheme, helping to run courses or providing one-to-one help in the literacy and computing classes. In the Neath cluster, several hundred people a month attend different sessions – and a recent jobs fair held by Communities First in the town attracted over 500 people.

The scheme fills in gaps in service provision that the jobcentre and advice centres don’t usually provide. Rather than endlessly referring people on to other services, attendees often join one class or session, and progress through several others, building confidence and getting a clearer idea of their own strengths.

Davies initially joined a walking group run by Communities First, aimed at boosting health and encouraging isolated people to socialise, but then started attending the reading groups after the Neath centre staff learned of her literacy problems. For Davies, Communities First isn’t just about getting the necessary skills to find a job. “It’s helped my confidence massively, and now I can actually think about getting a job. But if it goes, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she says. “And it’s not just people like me, it’s future generations in this community.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A literacy class at the Melin Advice Centre in Neath Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/Athena Pictures

But the scheme has been criticised for costing too much. In 2012, the programme was reorganised to focus on the most deprived “clusters” – most of which are in south Wales, especially around the valleys. Even so, last year the Welsh government paid local councils £31.7m in ringfenced Communities First funding. Neath Port Talbot borough council got £1.7m to split between three clusters – Neath, Afan and Western Valley. An evaluation for the Welsh government in 2015 found that “the programme is displaying a high degree of fidelity to its intended model of delivery” and that the focus on the most deprived areas was effective; but it also highlighted concerns about both austerity and the ability to attract qualified staff to run the local programmes.

Announcing the decision to consider scrapping Communities First, Sargeant said: “I am not convinced that continuing to focus on 52 small areas is the most effective way to deliver for Wales.”

“It’s going to be devastating, it’s going to cause a huge impact,” says John Warman, Neath’s mayor and a councillor for the ward the centre is based in. “There’s a lot of people who’ve been left behind. They might have missed out on education in schools; they’ve lost confidence and they’ve lost motivation. It’s vitally important that we don’t neglect those people, that we make sure those people are not left behind, and give them motivation and confidence for the future.” He points to official labour market statistics which show that 31% of Neath residents aged over 16 have no qualifications, compared to 26% across the whole of Wales. The area is, indeed, very deprived: it had the lowest male life-expectancy rate in England and Wales in 2013, and more than a quarter of the local working-age population don’t have jobs, compared to the British average of 22%.

The Welsh government has promised to replace Communities First with alternative initiatives to combat poverty, but Edwards is sceptical. “How do you deliver something so interconnected without those links? You need people to be engaged and Communities First is completely embedded in these communities. If you make a new programme you need to get people on it, and it’s the engagement of staff and volunteers that makes that happen,” Edwards warns. ”I think one of the most devastating aspects of poverty is the poverty of ambition. People lose the understanding of what’s even possible. That’s one of the things we help them with – to see there are possibilities. That’s not something you can do in one intervention, it means a relationship that’s built up over a period of time.”

The fallout from Brexit may also worsen poverty: a linked scheme, Communities for Work, has European money attached to it, and staff on the scheme are managed by Communities First employees. Communities for Work is based in Neath’s local library, which is struggling financially – the closure of both Communities First and the withdrawal of EU funding would mean the loss of rental income for the library. Many schemes are also run out of existing community buildings and help make them viable, and staff are fearful of the wider impact of both the Brexit negotiations and the Communities First decisions.

“I’m stunned by the [referendum] result,” says Warman. “We’ve always had to fight for every penny in Westminster. We know there will be money coming in from the assembly, but they are dependent on what they get from Westminster. So it will have a big effect on Neath and Port Talbot.”

Edwards and Warman have been told relatively little about the future, other than that there is a plan to offer a nine-month period of substantially reduced services, but to keep the best aspects of Communities First, although it’s unclear how this will be decided or judged.

“It will create a huge void in the community. The public understand Communities First because it’s being delivered direct to them. Not through bureaucratic layers with people just reading about it in the paper and never seeing the effect on their lives,” says Warman. “The public can see it, access it, and understand it: don’t take that away from them.”

Some names have been changed