Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 4. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:25 pm on 24 June 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:25, 24 June 2020

Yes, we're very well aware of some of the difficulties, and this particular outbreak is obviously associated with a meat-packing factory, and you'll be aware that that actually seems to a bit of a feature of the industry; we've had a couple of other outbreaks on the continent and so on. So, there's a review that my colleague Lesley Griffiths is undertaking here in Wales, but in conjunction with other Ministers from across Britain, and, actually, on the European continent, to understand what the specifics of that industry are that are causing that. It's possible to guess—it's cold and it's damp and there are a lot of metal surfaces and so on—but we need to understand exactly what's happened in this particular incident, and we also need to understand what the pattern of employment is, as you say, and what happens to people who are asked to self-isolate, not least, actually, because we want the industry to survive, and we don't want it to go out of business because it doesn't have a workforce, but we also want the workforce to be secure and able to self-isolate so that we can contain the incident. So, you're absolutely right to identify that. 

Some of the measures that you suggested there I would absolutely agree with you should be put in place, but they're obviously not in our devolved competence. So, we have been talking to the UK Government about making sure that people have rapid access to universal credit. We lobby them constantly on the five-week wait, for example, which is obviously very difficult in those circumstances, and we're maximising people's access to other incomes and support mechanisms; there's a range of things that the local authorities can do to do that. Each incident is likely to be different, so we're very much trying not to have a one-size-fits-all response as well because it depends on the nature of the workforce and people's living conditions and so on. I understand that, in this instance, a number of the workers at the factories live in houses in multiple occupation and so on, which has particular issues associated with it. So, we're working on that guidance, alongside the local authorities, to put what we can in place, and my colleague Hannah Blythyn has written a number of times to the UK Government on the welfare reforms that we'd need, and we're making sure that we keep the pressure up on them as well.