Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:28 pm on 22 November 2016.
I thank the Member for her points and questions. From the health perspective, it’s about maintaining the links we have and what we then want to build on, because this is not a programme with a huge budget attached to it. Much of what is actually achieved is achieved with a very small amount of money. Much of it is actually the knowledge transfer and equipping people to make their own choices. That was a recurring theme in the visit. It wasn’t about Wales saying, ‘We have the answers for you, now do as we say’, it was, ‘How do we work alongside local decision makers? How do we equip people to make their own choices?’ It was about how they want to live their own lives and a recognition of the knowledge that we can equip people with to be able to do that.
The most successful thing about the tree nursery is the fact that local farmers came and wanted to actually have—. They’d recognised there was something to having that because one of the awful things we saw recently was they’d had landslides and they’d had awful recurrences of events that have taken place in Wales, like the one we commemorated recently in Aberfan. There was a disaster that was very similar; a slide came down a hill and covered a school. The loss of life was more than double what had happened in Aberfan. So, there’s something about how we help people to understand the different changes and the way that they actually need to live their own life and to be able to have enough food to live on and to be able to have different industries to make those different choices. Now, that’s difficult; it’s easier to talk about than it is to actually deliver, but it’s the long-term nature of our commitment and working with people that allows us to make some of that progress.
In terms of the public health lessons that we’ve learned, it reinforces the very simple public health interventions that we already practice—vaccination and immunisation being one of the key issues and actually, where they don’t have a significant programme, lots of people lose their life for what we would consider to be simple issues. So, it really does reinforce the value of what we are very privileged to enjoy in this country in having a national health service, and it reinforces the danger of not having that, where you will see health inequalities, not just globally, but within that country to levels that none of us could or should find acceptable.