Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:58 pm on 15 September 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:58, 15 September 2020

Llywydd, I thank Adam Price again for those questions. The technical advisory cell summary published, I think, today, suggests that the R level in Wales is above 1. I don't think we would sign up to a figure as precise as 1.43. The problem with the R figure for the whole of Wales is that it is inevitably affected by the south-east corner of Wales, where we have seen such spikes in the last week or so. There are whole parts of Wales, Llywydd, where numbers are still very effectively suppressed, and an R level of 1.43 would not be a reflection of the circulation of the virus in those parts of Wales. So, a single figure for Wales at the moment is particularly affected by what we have seen in Caerphilly, in RCT and more latterly in Newport. Nevertheless, the TAC summary does suggest that the rate has crept back above 1 in Wales, and it's why we took the measures that we did on Friday of last week, to respond on a Wales-wide basis to that emerging picture.

The £32 million investment that my colleague Vaughan Gething announced on 18 August, Llywydd, will mean 24-hour working in labs in Swansea, in Cardiff and in Rhyl in October, and hot lab capacity more widely in Wales—at the moment in November. If we can, of course, draw it forward, we will want to do that. The investment is both a matter of capital investment but also employing more staff in those laboratories. We had 3,000 applications for the 160 jobs that will be recruited, and interviews for those posts began yesterday. So the sooner we are able to get those people in post, the sooner we will be able to get that lab capacity in active operation here in Wales. And when we have more capacity in that way, we will be able to think again about who we test, when we test them, including—I'm not suggesting that we've made that decision at all, but it will allow us to consider the issue of asymptomatic testing in a different way.