Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:39 pm on 8 April 2020.
Diolch, Llywydd, and thank you very much to Carwyn Jones for those questions and for just allowing me to say very briefly that the pressures of coronavirus are felt in every part of our lives, including in the Welsh Government. I am in Cathays Park today. There is a tiny number of people here compared to the normal number you would see working physically in the Welsh Government. They are people working very long hours, making some very challenging decisions, and I'm immensely grateful to the huge efforts that they are making to enable us to put in place a whole range of things that Members have been asking me about this afternoon.
The message to people thinking of going to Porthcawl or other places over the weekend is, 'Just don’t do it. Go outside, by all means, but stay local to where you live, stay away from other people and don’t think that this is the right moment to pose a risk to yourselves and a risk to others by doing things that you know are outside the guidelines that we are all required to abide by.'
If there is a need for increased enforcement, if that day comes and the police advise us of it, we will pursue that with them. I hope it won’t be advice that says we have to clamp down even further on the very limited opportunities that people have to be outside their own homes. It would be a great, great shame if the actions of just a few people were to place those restrictions on the very many people who are working so hard to do the right thing already.
As far as food shops are concerned, Lesley will be answering questions after me and she’ll have heard what the former First Minister has said. I know that she meets weekly with the food industry and the retailers here in Wales every Monday. It’s a forum in which those sorts of issues of common standards and common practices can be explored. I completely agree with what Carwyn Jones said that you can already see in some aspects that sort of standardisation beginning to happen, but there are other examples of the sort that he raised that I know can be discussed there.