Kinder Communities

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:23 pm on 17 March 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:23, 17 March 2020

Can I thank Jack Sargeant for that and thank him for the regular ways in which he takes the opportunity to make these points to the Senedd? And he's surely right, Llywydd, that, if ever kindness were needed, it's going to be needed by us all over the testing weeks ahead. And that will be challenging, because people who provide our public services are just as much under pressure as people who use them and, in our different ways, we are all providers of services on the one hand and users of services ourselves on others.

And I think the simple message—and it's one I heard Jack use himself before—is that we need to think always of ourselves in both capacities. If we are using a service, we need to think of how we would wish someone who is using our services to behave, and, if we're providing a service, we need to think about how the person using our service would themselves wish that service to be provided. If we do it that way with the empathy that Jack mentioned at the end of his question, then there is an opportunity there for us all to try to ground the actions we each take in that sense of wanting to respond to the unique qualities of the human being in front of us, and to put kindness at the centre of that interaction.