Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:03 pm on 17 March 2020.
I thank Andrew R.T. Davies for all of those questions and entirely agree with what he said about mental health. It isn't simply that lives have been turned upside down, but they've been turned upside down in an entirely unforeseeable way and at a speed that nobody could have anticipated. So, people who had perfectly stable and successful lives only a couple of weeks ago are staring down the barrel of real difficulties. I think both of those things—the fact that you couldn't plan for it, and it hit you at such speed—will make the impact on people's well-being very real. There are things that we can learn and want to learn from experiences even as long ago as 20 years ago in the foot-and-mouth crisis. I've been talking to the former First Minister today about some of his experiences at that time and what we might still be able to draw from that in helping people to get their lives back on an even keel.
The emergency Bill to be published later this week will provide ways in which we can have a more flexible approach to registration and regulation so we can accelerate people back into the workplace where that is the right thing to do. In the back of your mind, even in an emergency, we have to remember that there are very vulnerable people in these settings and that safeguarding isn't something that you can just entirely take off the table. So, there will still have to be some ways in making sure that people who are coming forward to help are the sort of people who you'd be happy to see in that capacity. But the system will, I think, be much slimmed down and designed to try and get people in to do the jobs that they want to do.
I entirely understand, of course, that people will want to know when the world will begin to get back to normal, including the operation of the health service. I'm afraid I can't offer anything like a date or even a time frame this afternoon that would be helpful to people. So far, my experience is that people are incredibly understanding of the need for people with more urgent needs to come in front of them. What I can say is that as soon as we see this curve that we expect come over the top and begin to come down the other side, and we're able to offer people reliable indications of how the system might be able to get back to where it was before, then of course we will be very keen to do that.