Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:49 pm on 22 September 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:49, 22 September 2020

Llywydd, I thank Adam Price for that. I caught some of what the Prime Minister said in the House of Commons but not quite all of it. I think it's important to remind colleagues that we start in a very different place in Wales. Our approach to unlocking coronavirus restrictions has been at a different pace and in a different way to that across our border. Many of the things that the Prime Minister is talking about doing today we have already done in Wales. So, in the part of his statement that I heard, he was talking about encouraging people again to work from home. Well, we have never, ever in Wales suggested anything else than that. We have never gone down the line of saying that people should get back on the bus and get back into work. Our advice has always been that, if you can work successfully from home, that is what you should do. We will reinforce that message today, but the message in Wales has never changed.

I heard the Prime Minister say that matters that are in guidelines in England are going to be put in regulations. Well, we've always made greater use of regulations here. Very early on, we put the 2m distance in the workplace into our regulations. It's not been in guidance in Wales; it's been a legal obligation on employers, and that's made a difference. When we published guidance to the hospitality industry, then our regulations require the person in charge of such a setting to have due regard for that guidance. So, we've already done that differently. The Prime Minister is going to tighten the rule of six, well, our rule of six has been tighter all along. You can only meet somebody from your extended household, not six people from any old household who could meet indoors. And I heard him say that he was going to halt pilots in the arts and sports world. Well, reluctantly, we halted our pilots 10 days ago. We had three successful pilots and we were hoping that, in this three weeks, we could have done more. We decided 10 days ago that things were too difficult for us to be able to do that. So, we start in a different place. There are things that we will be considering during the day. We will be talking with our colleagues in local government, in the health service, in public health and in the police about the additional measures that we might be able to take, but we will do it, as ever, with our partners. We will plan and then we will make an announcement. 

Across Wales, Llywydd, I think the majority of people continue to very carefully and very scrupulously observe the rules. They want to do the right thing and they want to know what the right thing is to do. There is a small minority of people who, somehow, took the message for the summer, when we were reducing restrictions, that coronavirus was over. Those are the people we have to convince that they need to go back to observing all the things that they were doing earlier in the summer, and that will mean that the effort across Wales will be strengthened again. That will be my message to people in Wales today. I agree with what Adam Price said: this does not have to be the pattern for the future, but if it's not to be, that depends crucially not simply on what Government does but on what every citizen in their own life does in order to make that collective effort that I think has been characteristic of the response in Wales.