6. Will the Leader of the House provide an update on the implementation of the Welsh Government's response to the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee report on refugees and asylum seekers? OAQ51402

Yes. The Welsh Government is working closely with the stakeholders, including local government, health services and the Welsh Refugee Coalition, as well as refugees and asylum seekers themselves, to develop a new delivery plan. This is being done with close reference to the committee's report 'I used to be someone'.

Thank you for that response, Cabinet Secretary. There is considerable interest in the committee's report in Newport, which, obviously, is one of the more ethnically diverse cities and areas in Wales, but also there are other areas in Wales that are similarly so. So, there is considerable interest out there and it's good to know that Welsh Government is working with refugees and asylum seekers.

I wonder if you could say any more about how the issues identified in the committee's report are being addressed, and likely to be addressed, and, in terms of that asylum seekers and refugees delivery plan, when the revised plan is likely to be published.

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.

Leader of the house, many asylum seekers and refugees may have skills that would prove valuable to the Welsh economy, but they are hindered by their inability, or limited ability, to speak English. The Welsh Government, in its response to the committee's report, acknowledged the importance of English for speakers of other languages courses . So, can I ask what progress has been made in updating the ESOL policy for Wales by March 2018 to ensure that the provision of these courses is sufficient to meet the demand in Wales, and especially south-east Wales?

English for speakers of other languages, as the Member rightly identifies, is a fundamental part of being able to settle properly in a new country and actually for that new country to take proper account of your skills and your ability to contribute. As such, we have, as part of the Welsh Government's skills provision, protected ESOL funding for several years through various budgets. We also work very hard with the UK Syrian resettlement programme, for example, to make sure that English for speakers of other languages is properly distributed. But there are problems with that, and the differing levels of support for differing classes of refugees is not really helping.

We are making a lot of recommendations and are lobbying to the UK Government to make them understand the real problems that the resettlement programme sometimes has for people being disrupted in terms of their language learning. There's a whole issue as well with people who arrive in Wales who are speakers of minority languages in their own country. So, for example, if Britain were to have the misfortune of being a war zone and we were all escaping, then those of us who speak Welsh as a first language would struggle even more to acquire the language of the country that we arrived in than those of us who speak English. Those things are really important to take into account, when we design these programmes.

We also have a huge problem where we don't have a tapering provision, and so those people who have a basic grasp of English are often in the same class as people who don't have any grasp of English, and those people who might be heading towards employment are also in that class, and also no provision for people coming in at the bottom either, as there's nowhere for people to to proceed to. So, a large amount of work needs to be done here. A large amount of funding also needs to be attracted by that, and we will be lobbying heavily the UK Government to step up to the mark in terms of funding some of those resettlement programmes.