Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:01 pm on 15 September 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:01, 15 September 2020

I entirely agree with that point, Llywydd, and it's been made repeatedly by me, by Vaughan Gething, by the First Minister of Scotland in a call where I joined with her, and, indeed, the First Minister of Northern Ireland in calling on the UK Government not to bring the furlough scheme to a blunt end—to recalibrate it, to recast it and to add to it an ability to support the wages of those people who we are asking to self-isolate for 14 days. At the moment, there is a perverse incentive for those people who work on very low wages to go into work when you're not feeling well, because otherwise you have to rely on £95-worth of sick pay every week. A simple scheme in which the UK Government itself guaranteed the normal wage level of those people, or indeed did it in partnership with employers, would eliminate that perverse incentive. I think it would increase compliance with the rules that keep us all safe and would be a sensible investment by the UK Government, because you will be, in the way we often talk about in this Chamber, acting preventatively rather than having to pick up the costs that follow when that person does go into work, infects other people, leads to greater demand on public services and firms having to stop production, and so on. 

My colleague Ken Skates is at the moment working on the third phase of the economic resilience fund here in Wales. Part of that consideration is the help that we can give to firms who find themselves caught up in local lockdowns here in Wales in future. Will our budget stretch to the income maintenance of people who are affected by the end of the furlough scheme or who need to self-isolate? I'm afraid we're simply not resourced to do that. Income maintenance is not a devolved function to the Welsh Government. Funds don't flow to us from the UK Government to support that, and it's much harder to see how we would be able, in an affordable way, to devise a scheme of the sort that Adam Price rightly draws attention to but that is equally rightly the responsibility of the UK Government to put in place.