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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:47 pm on 6 May 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:47, 6 May 2020

Well, there's something in what the Member says that I could agree with, because, of course, he is right that we have to make a success of the economy in order to be able to have the public services that we need. So, I agree with him in that very general proposition.

Where I can't agree with him is that this means that, provided we can protect the most vulnerable, we should be prepared to take risks with the health of other people. Because we're not talking about his health or my health, we are talking about the health of other people—other people who have children, who have families, and are not prepared to go down that road with him.

We will take the most careful and cautious steps forward—the steps that we believe will have the best impact for the minimal amount of risk, because any step beyond lockdown is a risk, but any sense of a cavalier approach to risk, in which we put people in harm's way knowingly, is certainly not something that I would be prepared to sign up to. 

As we open the economy up again, and I agree that we have to be able to do that, then we need to do it in ways that demonstrate to the people we are going to ask to go back to work that we have thought about those risks, we have mitigated those risks, we have taken all reasonable measures to make them safe in the workplace, that we are not going to create conditions in which coronavirus simply takes off again and spreads like wildfire through the whole of the population, creating huge spikes again in hospital admissions, overwhelming critical care capacity and so on. 

It's where you put yourself on the risk spectrum, and I want us to be at the part of the spectrum that demonstrates to people in Wales that we have seen everything we do through that public health lens, and we're not going to ask anybody to take a risk that we could have avoided.