Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:17 pm on 15 September 2020.
Again, I thank the Member for that supplementary question and agree with him, of course, about the importance of timely responses to tests that have been conducted. As I said in an answer to an earlier question, Llywydd, the difficulties that are being experienced in Wales at the moment are the result of the well-identified difficulties in the lighthouse lab system, a system that was working very successfully only three weeks ago and which we very much want to see being successful again as rapidly as that is possible. The UK Minister responsible says to us that within three weeks that system will be properly back on track and providing timely results to people in Wales and beyond.
In the meantime, our own laboratories continue, I think, to provide timely results: 91 per cent, for example, of hospital tests done at Public Health Wales labs are returned within 24 hours. And what we are trying to do with our own capacity is to use the most rapid results where those results are needed in that fashion. So, I think I may have said already, Llywydd—apologies if I did—that around 99 per cent of tests carried out in the community in Caerphilly are being returned within 24 hours. We need the lighthouse labs to be back operating as they were a short number of weeks ago in order to provide the same service to those parts of the system in Wales who depend upon those laboratories as well as our own.