Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 11:19 am on 8 July 2020.
I thank Dawn Bowden for that and for her acknowledgement of the work that the incident management team have carried out. They were unanimously agreed recently that an outbreak should not be declared at the factory and that it should continue to be managed as an incident.
Dawn Bowden, Llywydd, makes two important points, firstly, in relation to inspections of other factories; I certainly would expect there to be a heightened awareness amongst the Health and Safety Executive and others of the need to do that. And can I pay tribute, for a moment, to the role of the trade unions in all of these sites? Much of the from-the-front-line intelligence that we get comes through the trade union movement and alerts us to the need to inspect, and were the evidence to point in that direction, to extend testing to other settings.
The second point that Dawn Bowden makes is also very important, Llywydd—issues of community cohesion—and that has been very much in our minds at all the sites that have been involved in outbreaks or incidents. And we have learnt a number of things about the need for messaging in languages other than English and Welsh, to find different ways of communicating with workforces drawn from other parts of the world, and then to communicate clearly to other people in those areas about when there is evidence or, in these cases, no evidence of extensive wider community transmission, to allay fears that inevitably arise that this may be an outbreak or an incident not confined to the plant itself.