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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:48 pm on 8 April 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:48, 8 April 2020

Llywydd, I thank Mick for both those questions. On enforcement, he's right, the Health and Safety Executive has very important responsibilities, but a decade into austerity its ability to discharge those responsibilities has been really compromised. It just doesn't have the resources to do the job it's asked to do. We hope it will make its contribution in Wales.

Generally, I hope that the 2m rule won't rely in the end on enforcement. I hope it will be self-policing. I hope that it will send that message to employers of the importance that they must attach to the health and well-being of their employees. The best policing of it will be by the people in the workplace. They will be the eyes and ears of this arrangement. There are enforcement rules within the regulations. People can be fined and so on. I met the TUC general council in Wales earlier this week—virtually, in the way we are now—and I know that trade unions will be the eyes and ears of the workforce in the workplace. I hope it won't come to enforcement, I hope people will recognise the obligation that most other employers have already recognised to put the health and well-being of their employees at the top of the list, and our regulations just reinforce that.

I'm allergic to the phrase that I hear and read occasionally of, 'When everything gets back to normal', because I think the crisis tells us we don't want to just go back to what was normal before. Surely, we recognise that the only way that we are getting through this whole experience together is by collective and co-operative effort rather than by competition between one another.

I think it also tells us that, when we are absolutely up against it in this way, the people who we rely on to get us all through it are not very highly paid people who worry about whether their bonuses and their dividends will be safe during the crisis. We rely on the people who collect our bins, who look after our elderly people, who are the brave people who do the jobs in health and social care, and the many others that Caroline Jones mentioned in her introduction. I don't want to go back to a world in which those people just return to the obscurity of our priorities and other people just pick up from where they left off. There are real lessons for us all to learn from this experience. It's never too early, I think, to begin to be thinking about that.