Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:18 pm on 1 April 2020.
Again, I thank Paul Davies for those. On domestic violence, he is right, of course, that the sobering evidence from other places that have been in the coronavirus crisis earlier then us is that, when people are confined to their own homes, home is not a place of safety for everybody and, for some people, it is a place where real risks are posed to them. My colleague Jane Hutt has published new advice and guidance today to the sector demonstrating how we can improve the responsiveness of services that are already there, and to try to tailor them to the circumstances people now face.
I know that our colleagues in the police service are particularly alert to all of this. I was discussing this with a chief constable earlier this morning about the measures they are putting in place to try and make sure that, where crimes are committed—and an act of violence in the home is a crime—the police will treat it in exactly that way and respond in the way that we would expect.
It is a challenge, as Members will recognise, when people are confined to their homes, for good reasons of coronavirus, some of the ways in which they can alert others to things that are happening in their lives are longer available to them, and we are looking to see what has happened elsewhere to see if there any lessons we can learn in continuing to make the services we already have on the ground as effective as they can be in these difficult circumstances.
I wanted to take the question about the vulnerable and the self-isolating together, because it is really important to be clear that there are two different categories of people here. There are the 81,000 people who have been written to by the chief medical officer to say that their health condition is so significant that they should remain at home for 12 to 16 weeks, and that they should not go out at all and that they should be genuinely isolated from others who might otherwise bring harm to them.
Those are the people that we are offering a doorstep delivery of food to, where they don't have any other way in which food can be brought to them. The majority of those people will already have families and friends, and are likely to be users of existing services, and will be able to rely on those networks to assist them. But for those who can't, we've put in place a mechanism where we can take to people's doors—where that is the right thing to do—food that will be able to see them through the weeks ahead. That mechanism doesn't suit everybody. Some people are too vulnerable even to be able to pick up the box of food from their doorstep. In those circumstances, we are arranging through our local authority colleagues for food to be taken from their centres by volunteers out to people who need a service in a different sort of way.
There is of course a much larger group of people who are vulnerable: people aged over 70, women who are pregnant, people with pre-existing conditions, and so on. They are not required to remain at home in the same exclusive way. Many of those are people who will be able to make a visit themselves to the shop to get food supplies, but we are working with supermarkets to see how, in the services that they provide, the home delivery services, we may be able to identify people in that group as well, when we have finished dealing with the safeguarding group, to give them some priority for home delivery services. There are some data challenges in making people's personal information available to supermarkets in that way, but solutions to that are being devised.
As far as volunteers are concerned, of course, we started from a much higher base in Wales. Wales has always had a higher and healthier number of volunteers than other parts of the United Kingdom. We have 30,000 extra people who've come forward in the coronavirus crisis. They're coming through the WCVA, they're coming through the voluntary councils, and then there's a brokerage job to be done to make sure that their offers of help are matched with those who need it. Of course, we are keen for more people to come forward, because as the disease progresses, even people who have volunteered—numbers of those people will themselves find themselves not able to carry out those volunteering duties. So, the best advice to people who want to volunteer in Wales is to go to the WCVA site. It's a very simple process: you can register your willingness to help, and you will be matched in your locality with people who need that help.