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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 11:28 am on 3 June 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 11:28, 3 June 2020

Well, Llywydd, the first point in the Member's contribution is a reasonable one. Why are council areas in Wales amongst those most affected? I think there are a number of reasons that, at this stage, we might suggest for that. It's very important to remember that those figures are very much a fact of how much testing goes on. The more testing there is, the more you discover, and there will be some places where more testing has been carried out and therefore prevalence looks greater, whereas, in fact, it's just a product of different testing regimes.

But what we know about the virus is that it attacks places where people are older, sicker, poorer and live close together, and Wales is over represented in all of those factors. And when those things all come together, as they do in some of the most disadvantaged areas of Wales, then it's probably—. It may not be the whole of the explanation, and there'll be more that we will learn. But it is part of the explanation as to why you see some concentrations in communities in Wales that would be in other league tables, in the same sorts of places of disadvantage and bearing the burden of the period of austerity that the Member so cheerfully championed in another part of his political life.

Well, I completely disagree with him and I think it's dangerous for him to start suggesting to people in Wales that regulations are not proper law. They are proper law; they are the law of Wales. Don't be misled by what anybody suggests to you in thinking that they're not; they are. And there is a very easy distinction between regulations and guidance, and the Government has never confused people. There are people who have sought to confuse people by saying that the five-mile limit is a rule, whereas I have always, from the very beginning, been very clear that it is a rule of thumb, it is guidance for people to interpret in their local geographies as to what 'local' might mean for them. And, as I explained to Paul Davies, one of the primary considerations for it was to make sure that we didn't get a huge cascade of people from outside the more sparsely populated areas of Wales travelling to those places, where coronavirus has been, thank goodness, in very modest circulation, and that we didn't see a flaring up of coronavirus in those places because people had travelled from their own localities and brought the virus with them.

Llywydd, very far from constantly chopping and changing, what the Welsh Government has done is to introduce very modest changes at the end of each three-week period. We are taking the most careful and cautious approach. We are slowly building up a new repertoire of things that people can safely do in the coronavirus context.

I think that that absolutely chimes with what people in Wales want us to do, far from the sort of suggestion I think the Member is making that people in Wales are champing at the bit to be allowed to go further and do more. What we learn is that people in Wales understand that this virus is by no means beaten. Its impact is felt every day in the deaths that we have to announce every single day from it, and our approach of taking one step at a time, doing it carefully and cautiously, and building things up in a way that goes on providing confidence to people in Wales that it is their health and their well-being that is at the front of everything we do, not only is it the right thing to do, but it chimes very powerfully with the way that people in Wales would like to see their Government operate.