10. How is the First Minister ensuring that Welsh Government-funded services promote kinder communities? OAQ55275

Can I thank Jack Sargeant for that? Llywydd, amongst the measures the Welsh Government is taking has been the publication of our first loneliness and social isolation strategy, 'Connected Communities'. This is supported by £1.4 million over three years, beginning in the next financial year. It highlights the importance of kindness in reducing the feelings of loneliness and social isolation. 

Thank you for that answer, First Minister. As you know, this is a subject that we've discussed before, but kindness is not a vague concept, it's actually key to the way health services are delivered. It's about ensuring that individual circumstances are taken into account when they interact with the state, and I too would like to put on record my thanks to all those public service workers who are helping us through this tough time.

First Minister, we must ensure people providing services have the freedom to recognise and support appropriately. This is particularly the case when interacting with residents who have suffered adverse childhood experiences; we know that they could have real difficulty interacting with authority. So, First Minister, these are extraordinary times: people have lost their homes due to the flooding and now we face the incredible uncertainty of coronavirus. How can we ensure that they don't experience conflict when members of the public interact with public services, and they don't feel left behind and that public service leaders ensure that empathy is key to service delivery?

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.  

I thank the First Minister.