2. Statement by the First Minister: Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:38 pm on 1 April 2020.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:38, 1 April 2020

Diolch yn fawr. Thank you to Caroline Jones for those questions; I'll try and deal with them as rapidly as I can. As far as PPE for care staff is concerned, they are part of the supply arrangements for PPE, and a significant amount of PPE was released to care homes in Wales on Monday and on Tuesday of this week—a pack of PPE going directly to every residential care home in Wales. Where care homes are struggling in terms of access to food, then Menter a Busnes, an advice organisation we have in Wales, is contacting care homes to provide them with assistance in that area.

Free travel on public transport does not extend as far as social care staff, and that's for practical reasons only, in that the difficulties of identifying people as they get on a bus, and the responsibility that would put on the bus driver to be making those sorts of decisions, were felt, in discussions with the sector, to be over-onerous and we weren't able to do that.

As far as deliveries for people who are not being shielded but are nevertheless vulnerable is concerned, I certainly hope it's not the sort of choice that Caroline Jones suggested, and people who are in that position are advised to contact the hub of their local authority, because it's exactly the sort of thing that we hope the volunteers that we have identified might be able to assist with.

As far as the modelling is concerned, then, yes, the modelling certainly does have a capacity to contrast the impact of different lengths of period over which constraints on people's normal lives would need to be put in place. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies meets regularly—it will be meeting again this week—to look at those models and to give us advice.

On contact tracing, the dilemma's exactly the one that Caroline Jones pointed to at the end of her contribution, which is that we want contact tracing to be available, but we don't want to do it in the way that it's been done in some other countries, where it's obligatory, and your movements and your personal conduct are collected by the state and used in that way. It would have to be available to people who chose to contribute their data in that way, and then to make use of it for their own safety. But, the decision about it at this point, in the sort of society we are and want to be, would rest with the person who owns the data; that's to say you, me and each one of us individually, rather than being done on a compulsory basis, organised through Government.