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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 12:02 pm on 10 June 2020.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 12:02, 10 June 2020

Llywydd, I thank Alun Davies. I'll try very briefly to just offer a few strands in the way we are trying to do what he says. Our approach in Wales has been to try to work out how a policy could be implemented and then to announce the policy, not to announce the policy first and then worry about how you can make it happen afterwards. And we have seen, across our border, where that leads you to in their education travails of this week. 

We are determined to try to make sure that we take into account the messages we learn from people in Wales as we make our decisions. That's why, at the end of the last three-week review, we used the headroom we had to deal with the human heartbreak of not being able to meet people from another household who are important to you. That came directly from the messages that we were hearing from Senedd Members, but also directly from people themselves, and making sure that people's views and their preferences are plugged in is part of the way we will make those decisions. 

I think—[Inaudible.]—the decisions that we've got to make immediately and how we can plan over the period from now to the autumn, and then there is the work that Jeremy Miles is leading about longer term recovery. In both of those things, evidence from other places in the world is really important to us. We're learning a lot about the way lockdown is being lifted elsewhere and the risks that are then inevitably run of the R number rising and the virus being in circulation again. And I know that Alun Davies will have read of those examples in other parts of the world, just as we learn from places that have taken steps that don't result in that outcome. And then, in the way that Nick Ramsay said, we also need to learn the lessons of elsewhere about economic recovery, about ways in which we can create a fair economy of the future, in which we reward those people who do the work that we really depend upon, rather than those people who, in the way that we've seen over the last decade, have been able to use their advantages to create still more advantages, while leaving the rest of us behind.