Questions now from the party leaders. Leader of the opposition, Paul Davies. 

Diolch, Llywydd. First Minister, the last few weeks have seen communities across Wales devastated by storm Ciara and storm Dennis, and I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the emergency services and the communities up and down Wales who have worked tirelessly to support those affected. 

Now, I appreciate that the Minister will be making a statement on this matter later today, but are you confident that the Welsh Government has done, and is doing, all that it can to protect and support those affected by flooding across the whole of Wales? 

I thank the Member for that question. Can I echo what he said? Everywhere I went last week, Llywydd, meeting people in the most difficult of circumstances, the first thing they wanted to say to me was just how much they appreciated the efforts made by emergency services, sometimes to rescue them directly from life-threatening situations. So, even when they themselves were in awful predicaments, the first thing they wanted to do was to pay tribute to others, and I'm keen to echo his sentiments in that regard.

And he's absolutely right in what he said about community activity as well. I spent quite a part of one evening in Taff's Well rugby club just outside Cardiff and, the whole time that I was there, there was a procession of people coming to the club bringing goods, asking what more they could do, volunteering to be part of the effort that that centre was making to respond to the needs of people in those very difficult circumstances. And that sense of community effort in a crisis, I think, has been very characteristic of responses across Wales over the last two weeks. 

The Welsh Government is focused, at this point, on the services that we can provide to help individuals and households, businesses and local authorities in dealing with the immediate aftermath of the crisis, and we've put a series of measures in place to assist them in doing that. There will be a much longer haul for many householders and businesses, and indeed for local authorities in repairing bridges, making good roads that have been damaged, checking flood defences to make sure that they can be made resilient for the next time an event of this sort happens; and, in that, we will be seeking the assistance of the UK Government, because the costs of that are well beyond what the Welsh Government itself could, in an emergency of this sort, be expected to bear. 

First Minister, whilst some steps have rightly been taken and considerable progress has been made, I know first-hand from the conversations that I've had with some of those affected as well that they feel more could and should have been done sooner, and so it's clear that there are still lessons to be learnt and questions to answer.

Now, rightly or wrongly, some have expressed concerns around the co-ordination of the responses to some of these events, and I believe that that takes governments at all levels working together and collaborating more effectively than we've actually seen before. 

Now, you may be aware of concerns raised by Mari Arthur, chair of Welsh Water's independent advisory panel, who said that:

'We're missing that leadership, I feel, at the top to bring that together. That's why things aren't happening.'

Now, in addition to that, I understand that it's also been 10 years since the publication of the last flood risk management strategy and, whilst the Government has consulted, we are yet to see an updated strategy, which surely will help in making sure that responses are better co-ordinated in the future. 

First Minister, do you accept that the delay in publishing an updated specific Welsh flood risk management strategy has made some communities feel that flooding is simply not a priority? And how do you respond to the views of some in the sector that, moving forward, it's time that more effective leadership is shown on this matter?

I'll begin by agreeing with the point that the Member has made about there being lessons to learn. There are bound to be lessons to learn, aren't there? And it's really important that, when the immediate crisis is over, all of those who've had a part to play in responding to it take the time to see whether everything that was there in the plan was delivered on the ground in the way that was intended.

I think there were very real efforts made to co-ordinate response across Wales. The emergency co-ordination centre that the Welsh Government runs was open throughout the weekend of storm Dennis. The emergency services command structure was in operation throughout that weekend and had been doing storm Ciara in north Wales as well. It was an important test of that command structure, and when I met one of the chief constables in Wales, he told me that he felt that the rehearsals that we had held here in Wales over recent months in preparing for a 'no deal' exit from the European Union and in relation to coronavirus had stood them in good stead in being able to put those arrangements into practice. That is not to say that there aren't lessons that we can draw on when we stand back from all of this, but I do think that there were real efforts made to co-ordinate and to use the structures that had been put in place to respond to emergency circumstances. 

As far as the strategy is concerned, then yes, the strategy was out for consultation earlier last year. It closed in the autumn, and the Minister intends to publish the updated strategy in the months ahead. I doubt very much myself, Llywydd, that communities that found themselves on the sharp end of flooding events were concerned about the publication of a strategy at the point that they were dealing with the emergency, but that strategy is well in preparation. It will be published shortly and it will help build resilience and prioritise future investment in most at-risk communities.

Well, I do say to the First Minister, it is important to have an updated strategy so that we can avoid, perhaps, some of these events in the future. And perhaps we need to rethink as well how we address flooding in the future, especially given the warning signs received at the start of this Assembly. In 2016, for example, the Wales Audit Office reported that lack of capacity within the Welsh Government and councils had delayed progress and threatened to undermine the long-term approach to managing the risks of coastal flooding and erosion.

Well, perhaps we're feeling the effects of that now, First Minister, and with no updated risk management strategy, it's hard to see how we can make sufficient and appropriate progress in the short term. Therefore, in light of the impact that the recent storms have had across Wales, what lessons has your Government learned about the way in which flooding is prioritised by your Government? And will you also commit to providing a full breakdown of how the Welsh Government will be allocating its resources on flood risk management so that communities right across Wales can see the level of investment that the Welsh Government is making in their areas?

I thank the Member for that. I agree that we will have to think differently about the future. I don't draw exactly the same conclusions as he draws, because I think that the figures will demonstrate when these events are over that there were 73,000 households across Wales, as a minimum, that were protected from the effects of this extreme weather event because of the flood prevention schemes that have been implemented in Wales over recent times. So, the idea that things had not been done, I don't think will bear scrutiny.

Where he is right, I think, is that the plans that have been in place have been drawn up in order to be able to resist the sorts of weather events that we have experienced over the last 50 years. And it may well be—climate science is telling us that the sorts of events that we saw over the last two weeks are likely to become more frequent and more intense in the future, and therefore, the test against which we judge flood prevention schemes will have to be different in order to meet that new intensity of risk, and in that sense, the future will have to be different to the past.

I discussed this yesterday with the Secretary of State in the meeting that we jointly chaired about coal tips in Wales. Coal tips that pose a risk are inspected very frequently by local authorities, by the coal authority and by NRW. They inspect them against the sort of risk that a winter would pose. If those risks are going to be different, then the standards of inspection will need to be different, and, therefore, the future, as Paul Davies said, will have to now meet those new circumstances.

As to publication of expenditure by the Welsh Government under the flood and coastal risk management programme, we do that all the time. Whenever a scheme is agreed—£44 million in the south-west of Wales recently—then we publish those schemes and we publish the amounts of money associated with them, because we are very keen that people in Wales can see how the £350 million that is being spent over this Assembly term is being used to protect them from the effects of river and coastal flooding.

Plaid Cymru leader, Adam Price.

Diolch. Last week, I saw for myself, first-hand, the deep sense of community spirit that the First Minister also referred to, and I'll be visiting residents in Pentre again tomorrow. This is not a time to walk on by on the other side, when people are facing such hardship and distress, or, in the case of Boris Johnson, simply not to turn up at all, of course.

Now, the repair bill—I've seen one estimate—could be up to £180 million in Rhondda Cynon Taf alone, and I know the Welsh Government has provided £10 million of immediate hardship relief. Could the First Minister say whether you have yet a figure for the amount that you're asking for the UK Government to provide? In the event that they are not willing to make up the shortfall, does the Welsh Government itself have sufficient reserves for the scale of the challenge that we face?

I thank Adam Price for those questions. He is right to say that what the Welsh Government has done is to focus upon the immediate aftermath of the floods to make sure that we provide funding for individual householders directly affected, to pay for the clean-up costs of local authorities, to be able to begin to help businesses to get back on their feet. We can cover those costs from within our own budgets, by very careful management and drawing together of funds from different parts of Government. But beyond the immediate impact, when local authorities have major infrastructure repairs to be carried out, then that is not going to be £10 million, that's going to be tens and tens of millions of pounds. My colleague, Rebecca Evans wrote to the Treasury yesterday, formally setting out the fact that we will be looking to the Treasury for assistance with that bill.

It isn't possible, at this point, Llywydd, to put a precise figure on how much that will be, because some of the damage that will need to be repaired is literally still under water, so it hasn't been possible to get engineers down to look at the scale of the damage and to give us an assessment of what it will cost to put it right. The figure that Adam Price has referred to, which comes from RCT, I think is not an unreasonable estimate of what the damage in that county may be, and there's damage in many other parts of Wales, as well.

As the clean-up begins, of course, questions will need to be addressed about what could have been done differently—the lessons learned that the First Minister referred to. I was wondering if he could address some of those initial concerns. Natural Resources Wales have already admitted, I understand, that debris left behind by logging operations on the mountain above Pentre contributed to flooding there. There are also serious concerns that NRW don't have the capacity to cope with work that urgently needs to be undertaken. In Trehafod, Dŵr Cymru has made a £1,000 payment to 40 households without accepting liability as the pumping station there didn't function. So, can you, as a matter of urgency, look at the budget of NRW to ensure that it's adequately funded to deal with disasters on this scale and also set up an investigation into the role or contribution that any actions by either a statutory body or the utility made to some of the flood damage?

Well, just to repeat what I said to Paul Davies, Llywydd: of course, lessons will need to be learned. In relation to NRW's logging operation at Pentre, my understanding is that, in clearing diseased larch from a small part of the wood there, NRW did what the current guidance would suggest that they should do, which is to leave some of the smaller debris that you get when trees are being felled on the ground, because that's how you protect soil from erosion when trees are logged, and it's how you protect biodiversity gain. So, they were acting within the rule book as it's currently constructed. The question has to be now asked: is the rule book fit for these sorts of events, should they happen in future? That's just one example of lessons learned.

The summit that we held last week, Llywydd, did its best to draw everybody who had had a part to play in responding to the floods around one table. That included Dŵr Cymru, as it included the third sector and the voluntary sector in part of that response to the flooding that Adam Price referred to. We will be looking to see how all those players think about the part that they played and whether there are things that they would want to do differently in the future.

NRW's budget, like the budgets of all public services in Wales, has had to be calibrated against the impact of 10 years of austerity. I probably should have said, in answering Adam Price's first question, about the impact of the flooding on capital expenditure in the future. Part of the reason why we are having to ask the UK Government for assistance is because with six weeks of this financial year left to go, the Treasury wrote to us requiring us to repay to them £100 million of financial transactions capital, and £100 million of conventional capital, before the end of this financial year. They said that they had recalculated Barnett consequentials, and that that money needed to be returned to them. When I say to the Prime Minister that I want money to help us with the impact of flooding here in Wales, I'm essentially asking him to hand back to us money that he took away from us in the last few weeks.

When Yorkshire was hit with severe flooding in July and in November last year, and again this month, UK armed forces were drafted in to help. In the autumn, RAF Chinooks were called in to assist a pumping station near Doncaster following heavy rainfall. This resource—this level of response—might have been invaluable in the case of Trehafod and elsewhere. Although no infantry units are based in Wales—the First Battalion The Rifles is based, for example, just across the border, near Chepstow—Welsh men and women loyally serve in the forces and would, no doubt, have made a valuable contribution in serving Welsh communities during the crisis if asked to do so. Did you ask the UK Government, First Minister, for the assistance of the army? If not, why not, and will you in future if the need arises?

Well, the question as to whether or not assistance from the armed forces should be sought was very actively discussed by the emergency services command structure. Their decision over that weekend was not to make such a request because circumstances were so difficult and dangerous that only people who were specifically trained to be able to deal with them were thought to be safely capable of being deployed. That was the advice that they gave, and I thought that it was sensible to follow their advice.

They thought that drawing in the armed forces at that point would not have been a helpful thing to do because you needed those very specialist abilities and training to be able to cope with the sorts of extreme weather event that we saw, Llywydd. At the height of that storm, 900 cubic metres of water were coming down the Taff every second, and if you are trying to act in those circumstances, then you don't need a general army training to know what to do, you need to be trained in the way that our emergency services are trained, to know what is safe to do. Now, should that change, and should the assessment of those people who are better equipped than we are in this room, I think, to know whether help from armed forces would be a useful contribution, then of course we would look at it. But in the circumstances of that weekend, the assessment of those who are best equipped to make the assessment was that that was not the right moment to ask for such assistance.

Brexit Party leader, Mark Reckless.

First Minister, in response to Paul Davies, you said that local government, coal authorities and NRW all inspected coal tips. I wonder if you could reflect whether their responsibilities in that area are sufficiently clearly delineated or whether they're overlapping, with any associated potential for confusion. Could I also ask you, First Minister, whether you think changes to flood protection budgets, particularly the significant cut I recall, at least initially, being announced in 2016, have affected the current situation in any way? I infer from the funding request letter from Rhondda Cynon Taf politicians to the UK Government that this has Welsh Government support, and I hope that UK Government will agree to it. Do you think that this letter, this request for financial assistance outside of the block grant, could provide a template for future co-operation between Welsh and UK Governments?

I thank the Member for those questions. I don't think that the budget in terms of flood prevention has been the problem over the last two weekends. Thinking of lessons learned, one of the things I think we will need to look at very carefully from now on is the many flood defences in Wales that held good, but were perilously close to being overtopped—in Monmouth, for example, where the flood defence is constructed to be able to deal with a rise in floodwater of 4.3m, and the river actually rose by 4.2m. So it was within a centimetre of those flood defences being overwhelmed. Now, they weren't overwhelmed, just as they weren't overwhelmed in Cardiff, and they weren't overwhelmed in Swansea, but in many places the gap between holding and not holding was narrow, and in lessons learned for the future we need to see whether we need to do anything to strengthen those further.

As far as help from the Treasury is concerned, I think we are already acting in a way that is consistent with rules that have been established over many years. When a completely unforeseeable event happens, and it happens on the scale of the sort that we saw over this weekend—and I don't think anybody believes that the ferocity with which the storm hit south Wales was foreseeable—[Interruption.]

You're answering the leader of the Brexit Party, and not the local Assembly Member.

I don't believe that the event of that weekend was predictable, and when unpredictable events happen and costs are commensurately high, the ability to go to the Treasury for help from reserves is one we've used before, and we're using it again here.

First Minister, you were interrupted, but I will also just remind you of the point about the division of responsibilities between local government and NRW and the coal authorities in terms of those inspections.

One thing struck me about the RCT-based letters: it was a request to draw supplementary funding above the block grant in a devolved area, and as such could represent a change from the Barnett formula. If we are to see that as a template for future co-operation between Welsh Government and UK Government, would Welsh Government consider writing a letter of that sort, perhaps to draw capital from the shared prosperity fund for infrastructure projects, such as improvements to the A55 in north Wales or even the M4 relief road that you had promised to build? Also, Wales has an overall fiscal deficit this year of £13.7 billion, or 19 per cent of GDP, and we're asking UK Government for additional funding above that. Doesn't that show the danger of always demanding more and more powers and devolution and separation of Wales from the UK?

I don't draw that conclusion at all, Llywydd. I think the case for seeking assistance from the UK Government is simply the case for the union. The union is a mutual insurance scheme in which we all pay in, and we're all able to draw out in circumstances where help is needed. It's why I've always been a supporter of the United Kingdom, because I think that system of mutual insurance has always been in Wales's interests. It's why I hope that the Prime Minister—who has awarded himself the title of Minister for the Union—will see that the request that we have made for assistance is one where he can demonstrate that the union really does work for Wales.