Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:31 pm on 1 October 2019.
Yes, well, actually, civil contingencies are in the portfolio of the First Minister and the Deputy Minister and Chief Whip, but I'm doing the statement on behalf of the Government today—just to be clear about that. The Deputy Minister has been working very hard with third sector partners to ensure a state of preparedness, as good as we can get it, in what we have.
I mean, the short answer to your question is: there has been some money coming from the European transition fund, but other money has been diverted direct from service delivery in order to do this work. So, it's absolutely heartbreaking to consider what we might've been able to do with this money, had it been available for services, and that's the short answer. The other answer is that we just don't know how much it's going to cost, because until we see what the challenges are, if we do crash out, we won't know. So, we will have to put contingency funding in place to make sure, and I'm at a partnership council only tomorrow to discuss with local authorities what their best guess for what that might look like is. So, it's not good news, by any stretch of the imagination, but I was very pleased that the auditor general felt that public services and the third sector had worked very hard to get themselves into the best position they can be.
I was particularly pleased of the work we'd done around community cohesion, and our ability to put better planning and better support into local authorities for those communities who are, let's face it, feeling very vulnerable. We want very much to help them feel as cherished as we can make them feel in Wales while this goes on, but—. We'll all be familiar in our own constituencies—yours is a very similar constituency to my own—of people who have hitherto felt Welsh and very much part of our culture being made to feel unwelcome, and I very much regret that.