Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:53 pm on 17 March 2020.
Thank you very much for those questions. I think Janet Finch-Saunders is right to worry about the domiciliary care sector. I worry about it a lot, because we rely on it so much, and yet people who work in that field will be equally vulnerable to getting the virus, and the points that Janet made about providers being asked to review their lists and be sure that they can prioritise visits where they absolutely have to are part of this preparation.
An important point was made about information sharing. We're all familiar with the much stricter rules there are in recent times—general data protection regulation rules—that make public authorities nervous about information sharing in case they're in breach of some regulation. So, we intend to raise this through the UK-level discussions so that we can provide some assurances to public authorities that in these circumstances passing information to help somebody else to do the right thing will not rebound on them afterwards, and that's an important point made.
Through the Welsh Local Government Association, we anticipate very shortly that each local authority will become the focal point for local people who've been care workers in the past, or recently retired or moved to some other job, who are willing to come back into that workforce. The local authority—their local authority—will become the first point of contact, so that there is some sort of system put around people's willingness to respond in that way.
As I said in answering questions earlier, Dirprwy Lywydd, there is a meeting planned tomorrow with the WCVA, with county voluntary associations and others to try to harness all that effort that we know people are willing to make locally. I hadn't thought of hoteliers in quite the way that Janet described but she's right, of course, that they are people who have particular skills in looking after people in that context, and may be in a position to adapt those skills and help in others. So, again, thank you for making that point and I'll make sure that it's passed on.
Nurseries—I believe there is advice available to nurseries. It's a dispersed sector; not everybody may know where to look for the advice that is available to them. But, again, across the United Kingdom, nurseries is one of those sectors where action will need to be taken to make sure that good providers doing really important work—and we've had a growth in providers in Wales through the childcare offer and so on—are still there after coronavirus, when their services will be needed again, whereas in the short run they may struggle because they rely on fee-paying parents whose children may not be turning up. So, there's work going on to try and make sure that the UK Treasury understands a short-term intervention to keep those businesses alive, because they're good businesses and viable businesses and we need them to be viable when all this is over.