Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:54 pm on 17 March 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:54, 17 March 2020

I thank Paul Davies for that. Can I too, Llywydd, extend my sympathy to the family and friends of the first person to die from coronavirus here in Wales? Can I thank him and Angela Burns as well for attending the meeting we had yesterday, but also for the opportunities I've had over the last couple of weeks to discuss the unfolding crisis with the leader of the opposition? I'm grateful for his thoughts and advice during those telephone calls. I completely agree with what he said. This is a crisis that we will get through by working together across parties and across administrations, and my aim is to do exactly that whenever we are able to do so.

Can I agree with him? Panic buying is not a solution to coronavirus. We have to urge our fellow citizens to think about the consequences of their actions. Any crisis brings out good and bad things in people, doesn't it? And there's been an enormous upswelling of generosity around coronavirus as well, with people volunteering to look after others, asking what they can do, wanting to find ways in which they can help to look after other people who are more vulnerable than themselves. So, we see all of that, and yet sometimes people act in that, sort of, group way: they see other people doing things, they think they must copy what they see other people doing, and we end up with a problem that need never have happened in the first place. 

Now, we are, to an extent, well-prepared for some of this because of the preparation that went on last year in the Brexit context. Had we left the European Union without a deal, then there would inevitably have been impacts on the supply of goods and services and we have reactivated the machinery that we had in those contexts to make sure that we're always well in-touch with the retail industry and the logistics industry, and my colleague Julie James issued a statement on this last week. The clear message from the sector is that provided people behave rationally, there is no shortage of food to go around.

There was then the second question that Paul Davies raised about how we make sure that help can be given to those people who will need to get food and other things because of the constraints on their own behaviour. I want to let him and other Members know that we are working closely with our local authority colleagues and our colleagues in the third sector here in Wales to make sure that we put a bit of a system around the offers of help that we know are there in Wales, so that people know where to go in order to access the help that can be made available to them. We will be meeting tomorrow with representatives of those sectors and with community councils as well. There are a series of organisations that have a part to play in making sure that help can be mobilised at that individual level. We'll be bringing people around the table, making sure that we're able to provide consistent and reliable advice to people in Wales as to how they can get that help with social circumstances while they're attending to the medical impact of the coronavirus.