Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip (in respect of her portfolio responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 2:46 pm on 6 December 2017.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:46, 6 December 2017

Yes. A draft of the plan will be brought to the refugee and asylum seeker operations board on 16 January and subsequently presented at the refugee and asylum seeker taskforce meeting in mid March, in terms of the timing.

In the meantime, we've been working very hard to ensure that we take the committee's full, and very good report if I might say, into account in our completely new approach to how we look at some of these services. The Member shares with me a constituency that has a very large amount of asylum-seeker and refugee families in it, and I share his concern.

A number of good projects are under way. In my own constituency—and I'm going to do a shameless plug here, Llywydd, so I would like to alert people to it—a number of books, produced by the refugee community poetry association in Swansea, one of which is entitled My Heart Loves in My Language and which I defy anybody to read without being in floods of tears by page 3, which explains some of the isolation and desperation that people feel when they cannot express themselves anymore in the language of their birth. I am absolutely determined that we are going to make sure that those people's lives are happier, healthier and much better now that they've found their way safely to Wales than they were before.