Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:46 pm on 13 May 2020.
Thank you. Well, it's no surprise to me that people who are the least well-off in our country run the greatest risks in terms of their health. There is a direct relationship between poor health and poor economic outcomes as well that don't match the talent that exists in those communities, and I see that within my own constituency that I'm proud and privileged to represent. It's a picture that many of us in the Assembly will recognise.
The challenge of where you have poorer ill-health outcomes to start off with and then having widespread communal spread of COVID-19 and then you have the overlay of how closely people live together, people's inability, potentially, to travel to work in their own car—. I represent one of the parts of the country that has one of the lowest levels of car ownerships; there are different challenges that people face in how they live their lives. But it also reiterates the importance of the test, trace and protect scheme that we're going to be introducing across the country. It's about protecting people from that harm that would otherwise take place. It's the importance of the social distancing rules. The further people adhere to that guidance and those rules, the more likely we are to prevent harm taking place in any family or any community.
And I can honestly and absolutely say that, for this Government, the achievement of social justice drove us and Government-supporting backbenchers into politics in the first place. It's the reason I gave up my other job to stand for election; it's the reason I joined my political party; and it's right at the centre the reason for being of this Welsh Labour-led Government. I'm proud that it is.
We'll have a great deal more to do at the end of the coronavirus pandemic, though, because we will see harm that will have been unequally distributed across our country, and that's why the path to recovery has to take account of that and think about how we rebuild and remodel, not just our economy, but the values that drive our choices. For example, the value we place on social care workers, who we'll all applaud on a Thursday evening, but then to consider how much we are prepared to pay them, what we expect them to do in caring for some of our vulnerable citizens and what sort of society we want to build around that to make those choices possible.