Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:55 pm on 1 April 2020.
Well, Llywydd, I thank David Rees for all of those questions. On free school meals, he is right, it is an entitlement, and my view is that local authorities should simply use the normal routes. Children become entitled to free school meals all the time in normal circumstances during the year, and each local authority will have a process for those children's circumstances being verified and then entitlement delivered, and they should just use the normal ways in which they would treat any other child in any other circumstances.
As far as keeping the Treasury informed of the way in which the help they've announced so far is being delivered on the ground, there are a series of opportunities to do that. There are sub-committees of COBRA that meet every day. I attended one yesterday, and part of that meeting was an opportunity for people to feed back on the way in which the schemes the Treasury has announced are working out on the ground and where there are gaps emerging. That is not to give a guarantee for a moment that the Treasury will respond to all of that, but David Rees's question was, 'What are we doing to make sure they know about them?', and we are using the different opportunities we have, and information from Assembly Members is particularly valuable to us in being able to make that part of the feedback exercise.
Of course, as the local Member for Aberavon, it's completely understandable that David would want to highlight the plight of the steel industry. Welsh Government officials are in constant dialogue with Tata around the blast furnace, around the challenges that the company is facing, and my colleague Ken Skates is due to speak with senior executives from Tata on Monday of next week. By keeping in as close touch as we can with the company, making sure that they know the different sources of help that are available to them, but also the challenges that they are facing, we will want to do what we always want to do as a Government, which is to support our steel industry in Wales.