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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:34 pm on 13 May 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:34, 13 May 2020

Llywydd, can I thank Helen Mary Jones for those very constructive suggestions? I will share with her that we welcome the furlough scheme and we welcome its extension, and I think she's right as well. But the unfairness in it, particularly to those people who were changing jobs at the time, was not an intentional unfairness, but it is a very real unfairness in the lives of those individuals, and we do and will go on putting those points directly to the UK Government as evidence of some of the unintended aspects of the schemes put in place by the UK Government become more apparent.

Helen Mary Jones will know that we paused our own economic resilience fund to take stock of it, to see whether there is any fine tuning that we could make to be able to meet some additional gaps in the provision made by the UK Government. We're working hard inside the Welsh Government now to see if there are any further ways in which we might be able to collect some money together to bolster that fund still further. And I will absolutely make sure that I discuss with Ken Skates the plight of the people Helen Mary Jones has highlighted this afternoon.