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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:07 pm on 8 April 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:07, 8 April 2020

Llywydd, I thank Adam Price for those important questions. He's right, of course, about the range of views. We have a Welsh representative on SAGE, we have our own chief medical officer. They distil the advice and give bespoke advice for Wales, and that includes some specific modelling that they are able to do, and I will raise with them the specific question that Adam Price has raised about modelling in a contact-tracing area to see whether different advice would come for Wales. Up until now, that hasn't been the case, but we shouldn't stop asking the question, I agree.

On PPE, there is a UK procurement, the product of that gets divided out to Wales, to Northern Ireland, to Scotland and England, and it's then for us to onwardly transmit that to people who need it. If there is someone who is anxious about not getting what they need, they should use the dedicated helpline that's available to them. That way they will get the right answer in the quickest possible way.

On the DBW point, I'm absolutely struck by the signal it sends about the level of distress in the economy. The Development Bank of Wales would normally get about 500 applications a year for the sort of funds that were set aside a week or so ago; they had 1,100 applications in a single week for that £100 million. The good news—and, again, I want to just pay tribute to the staff of the bank, because within three days, they were making the first decisions, and by the end of last week, the first moneys were in the hands of Welsh businesses. The challenge for Welsh Government now is to see whether there's anything more we can do to augment that fund. As Members listening can, I'm sure, understand, there are calls for funding from absolutely every aspect of Welsh life in this crisis, and a finite amount of money from which to meet all those calls. The Welsh Government is squeezing money out of every pocket we can find to try to dedicate to meeting those most urgent needs, and we will be doing that again in the Development Bank of Wales context.

Finally, on Adam Price's point about a concerted UK message in advance of this weekend, that was the purpose of my discussions with the First Ministers of Scotland and Northern Ireland earlier, to try to get a common message. I think we are all agreed that, as I said in my introductory statement, there is no prospect at all that the measures we are all having to observe will come to an end at the end of this three-week period. They will be continuing in Wales next week. I believe they will be continuing elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and if we could get that single message in a concerted, united way out across the United Kingdom, that would, of course, give it additional force and strength.