Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:10 pm on 13 May 2020.
Well, Llywydd, I entirely agree with Dawn Bowden. All the emerging evidence is that this is a virus that attacks those people in our society who are most vulnerable, and poverty is an underlying vulnerability because poor people tend to live more closely by one another, and the virus circulates where people are in more densely-populated areas. If you're poor, you're more likely to have underlying health conditions, and it's a virus that attacks people who have underlying health conditions. And you just don't have the resources that other people are lucky enough to be able to draw on to protect yourself against the crisis that we face.
So, Dawn Bowden is absolutely right to point to the way in which underlying health inequalities are compounded by the virus. And when we come out of all of this, I just want to echo something that the former First Minister said to me in the session last week: we cannot go back simply to the way things were before, in which we overly value the contribution of some people in our society that has been of no practical use to us in this crisis, and we undervalue the contribution of other people, who are often the least well paid and the least well resourced.
So, it's incumbent on us in the Welsh Government, certainly. It's why we've put, as you know, for example, £11 million more into our discretionary assistance fund to get help directly to people— 11,000 payments made already directly for COVID-related purposes from the discretionary assistance fund; more than £670,000 paid to the poorest families in Wales. And the UK Government will need to match that too. It's very disturbing, isn't it, to hear reports in the newspapers today of the UK Government planning to deal with the consequences of coronavirus by a pay freeze amongst public sector workers—those very workers that we have relied upon to get us through this crisis. That will not be the way to respond and, if we did it that way, then all the inequalities that Dawn has pointed to will be exacerbated rather than eroded, as we are determined to try to do in Wales.