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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:28 pm on 6 May 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:28, 6 May 2020

Llywydd, I thank Mick Antoniw for both of those questions. Our £500 is there to recognise the amazing contribution, the brave contribution, that workers providing direct personal care for people in our care sector are making during the crisis. When the crisis is over, I entirely agree with Mick Antoniw—we need to make sure that those people who have been so important in responding to the crisis are regarded as equally important afterwards and are rewarded in a way that we would want to see them rewarded.

Let me say again, because I said it at the time: the help of the Secretary of State for Wales in making sure that the payments we made from the discretionary assistance fund to people who had been the victims of flooding—that that didn't count towards benefit calculations—was very helpful, and I hope that he will be able to be equally helpful to us here. We want every pound of that £500 to go directly to the people we are seeking to reward. It should be free of tax, it should be free of national insurance, and we raised this with the UK Government before making the announcement, and I know that my colleague Rebecca Evans has written to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury since, again, making the case for the UK Government to recognise the contribution that those workers are making, not just in warm words, but in the hard cash that we have found from the Welsh Government's budget and needs to go to those people and not be siphoned back to the Treasury in tax and national insurance contributions.

And on the involvement of the Wales TUC and of unions more generally, the point, Llywydd, that I make and try to make to UK Government Ministers is that unless we can convince people that it is safe to go back to work, then you can open whatever you like, people won't turn up there if they feel that they are putting themselves at risk. One of the best ways of being able to demonstrate to a workforce that all reasonable steps have been taken to making that workplace safe, is to have the trade union say alongside you that those actions have been taken. So, the trade unions have a really pivotal role and a positive role in demonstrating to workforces that going back to work is safe, because they themselves have been involved in those preparations. That's the way we're trying to do it here in Wales. I think most Welsh employers have an appetite to do it in just that way. And Alun Davies asked about learning from one another and passing lessons to one another. The way that we have put our 2m rule into regulations, the way in which we regard trade unions as central partners in making workplaces safe, I think that's something that could be learnt by other parts of the United Kingdom.