Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:17 pm on 19 October 2016.
Thank you for your statement, John. I’m slightly thrown now by Mark Isherwood’s figures earlier on, but in your speech you mentioned that we had 112 refugees from Syria resettled in Wales, which means that that doesn’t seem to have changed since August, if that’s still the case, and it still means that 13 councils haven’t resettled any Syrian refugees at all. I’d certainly like to know whether your inquiry into this is going to drill down to find out why, after two and a half years, 13 councils still haven’t taken anybody. On the back of that, congratulations to Torfaen. Swansea and Neath Port Talbot have also got modest numbers of Syrian refugees resettled. Is your inquiry going to assess the quality of support and the outcomes for the refugees who have been resettled here? The First Minister, a couple of weeks ago, said that he would be talking to the WLGA personally about the new children’s resettlement schemes. I was wondering whether the First Minister was likely to be asked to come and give direct evidence on the back of those talks.
On a separate issue: language. In fact, I regret chickening out on moving this amendment now, but whether languages in some of the communities in Wales—and I don’t mean the Welsh language now—still prove a major source of isolation for particular groups of people, including women in particular and older people who might have moved into communities and not had access to languages other than those that they speak themselves; whether there’s any work that could be done there to find out how much of a barrier to integration language can be. Sorry; you probably know where I’m going with that.
Then, thirdly and completely differently, I wonder whether it would be possible for the committee to look at reviewing the effectiveness of disability awareness raising in Wales across all sectors, not just the public sector, and perhaps pinning down who should be taking lead responsibility for that. I’d like to include autism awareness and dementia awareness in there as well. I appreciate that that’s different from disability awareness, but we speak about this a lot and I’m wondering whether, at some point, we could get an Assembly report, as opposed to Government figures on this, to show how well it’s going. Thank you.