Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:48 pm on 20 May 2020.
It's a pleasure to follow Dai Lloyd, and I thank him for his comments there. I know the John Snow story well as, 25 years ago, I lived in a flat above the John Snow pub, looking over that pump that has been preserved in now Broadwick Street.
We all emphasise the public health issues, we all have concern for the other health issues, and my colleague Mandy Jones spoke very ably about those in the debate earlier. I think we also need to have a degree of consideration for the economy, not least because if we don't have the resources, we won't be able to fund the health.
We are voting against both sets of regulations today. The amendment 2 regulations—quite minor amendments in them; I find it extraordinary the Minister can sign them off as being urgent, at least in some of the cases. We have moot changes to the once-a-day requirement to allow certain groups to be exempt from that, but that once-a-day requirement, which should never have been there in the first place, has already been removed by the No. 3 regulations that came into force before we had a chance to consider them. The No. 2 regulations, I mean it's an extraordinary minor point: apparently a requirement
'to resolve the tautology of having a "need to obtain basic necessities"'.
I mean, has Welsh Government got nothing better to do? How on earth can that have been urgent, Minister? And it's not just pedantic, but it's wrong. Whether or not you have a need to basic necessities will depend in part on whether you have them or not already.