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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:49 pm on 29 April 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:49, 29 April 2020

Llywydd, can I thank Carwyn for those three points? I do share his sense of despair at the know-your-place approach to devolution. But, personally, I've never settled for the idea that devolution is about competitive comparisons with other parts of the United Kingdom. It is much, much more about each one of us doing the things that we think are right in our own places and learning from one another in the experiment that that naturally creates.

Carwyn makes a very important point about testing. If you're not symptomatic today, that does not mean to say that you may not have acquired the virus by tomorrow. If you're going to try and draw any value from testing non-symptomatic people, you'd have to do it every single day, and those are tests drawn away, then, from people who really do need to be tested where proper conclusions can be drawn. So, I understand that people somehow believe that having a test gives you an answer and creates a set of certainties, it just doesn't if you don't use the tests in the right way, and we're trying to use them in the right way here in Wales. 

And can I end, Llywydd, by just echoing everything Carwyn Jones said in his last remarks? He is echoing an argument that he made over 10 years of austerity that the price of the banking crisis should not be loaded onto the shoulders of those least able to bear it. And, yet, that is exactly what we saw: people whose benefits weren't raised for year after year; people whose wages were held down year after year; all those people doing all the things that we have had to value during this crisis who weren't valued at all. And we cannot and must not allow the UK Government to believe that the answer to the expenditure that has necessarily and rightly been incurred to deal with coronavirus is to be clawed back by a re-imposed austerity in which all the costs fall on all those people who have done the most to help us get through it together.