Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:43 pm on 11 July 2017.
There has to be change—it’s clear. I wouldn’t use the word ‘wholesale’. I’m reluctant to express a view without seeing the recommendations of the report, for obvious reasons, but we would want to implement as much of it as we can and to seek consensus across the Chamber in order to do that.
In terms of skills, there is no doubt that any kind of restriction on migration will make the skills situation worse because, of course, the social care sector recruits heavily from outside the UK, as, of course, does the medical and nursing professions. That’s an impact we can’t control directly here. But if he’s asking me the question, ‘Is this simply an exercise that we are taking forward without there being a clear end game?’, the answer to that is ‘no’. We want to make sure that, working with other parties around this Chamber, we can implement as many of the recommendations as possible. We have to see them first in order to make a judgment as to whether we can do that for all of the recommendations, or most of them.