Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:48 pm on 18 September 2018.
Llywydd, I thank the Member for those very important points. The real way to mitigate the disasters that she points to is to have a deal that we can all sign up to as we leave the European Union. I think it was the former governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, only a couple of weeks ago, who pointed to the utter absurdity of the sixth richest nation on the face of the globe having to prepare for a situation where we have to stockpile food and medicines as though we were about to enter some sort of wartime period. He was ridiculing the idea that we have manoeuvred ourselves into that sort of position, and this by a man who advocated that we ought to leave the European Union. So, the real way of mitigating the difficulties that the Member points to is not to find ourselves in the position of a 'no deal' with all the difficulties that she describes.
I think she has probably looked in vain for advice from the UK Government on this matter because, from memory—and I will check it to make sure that I've got this right—this is one of the areas that is yet to be addressed in the technical notices. There are a series of other matters, many of them pointing to even greater areas of difficulty, I believe, on which the UK Government is yet to provide advice to businesses or to the public as to how those matters will be navigated on a 'no deal' footing, and I think the reason we haven't seen some of those things is because, in those areas, the messages will be even starker than those pointed to by Steffan Lewis earlier.