Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:41 pm on 15 September 2020.
Well, Llywydd, I think the risk in the Member's question is to conflate short-term and long-term consequences of the pandemic. In the short run, there's absolutely no doubt at all that commercial property values have been affected by coronavirus and that they will continue to be affected as the economic shock of the pandemic unfolds across our economy. But I don't think that we should assume that those short-term impacts are guaranteed to be characteristic of the way the economy will recover. Nor do I think it is fair to criticise any organisation from having made lending decisions in one set of circumstances when something entirely unforeseeable then makes a difference to the way that those investments are now valued. What I expect to see is I expect lending decisions now to be calibrated to the current set of circumstances we see, and I expect us to take a long-term view of some of those investments and not to make decisions in haste that would respond to what we all surely hope is a temporary impact of a global set of circumstances on our economy and that the economy will recover in ways that will protect those investments in the longer term.