4. Statement by the Counsel General and Minister for European Transition: COVID-19 Reconstruction — Challenges and Priorities

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:17 pm on 6 October 2020.

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Photo of Jeremy Miles Jeremy Miles Labour 4:17, 6 October 2020

I thank the Member for those questions and for the welcome that she has given to the document and the interventions that are described in there, for which I'm grateful. I think her comments could be summarised in two broad points, and I hope I don't do them a disservice in doing that. Firstly is to remind us that the contents of the document need to be seen alongside the public health challenge that COVID obviously represents on a daily basis in our lives, and the context of that is a shifting context. I think she raised the point of context herself, and I think it is important to bear that in mind, and I do acknowledge the point that she makes about the anxieties that people across Wales feel about living through this period and living through lockdown and so on.

So, I think the task that the document sets out to meet is to respond to what we already know is the effect of COVID, alongside the task of responding on that more daily basis for some of those challenges. But it is important as well to plan ahead. What we don't want to see—and we have not followed that path in Wales—is a sort of reactive approach, which perhaps has been a feature elsewhere. We've tried to be evidence-based, programmatic and planned in how we respond to COVID in all its many guises, and that's the future of this document as well: it's an attempt to look forward as well as to start the work of reconstruction now.

She makes another point, which I think is intended as a criticism. It's to say that there are some interventions here that, I think, in her words, could have happened anyway, and I think—the point I was making to a Member earlier is that many of these interventions have been under way already. If she looks at the section of the document that talks about the interventions in the immediate post-COVID period, she'll recognise a number of familiar policies in there, and, throughout the pandemic, many of these challenges that we've known have existed for some time we've been continuing to address through prioritising parts of our programme for government that most closely deal with those.

But I think—and I hope she would accept this—that what has happened in the last few weeks and months is a growing understanding amongst the public at large of the scale of some of these issues and an enthusiasm—perhaps a deeper enthusiasm, if I may say—for getting to grips with them. And certainly COVID has demonstrated to us where those inequalities have existed in Wales, but I do want to impress upon her that we've approached this task asking people in Wales what matters most to them but applying the lens that we've applied as a Government throughout, which is the question of economic justice, environmental justice and social justice, and then that is what gives you the range of priorities and interventions that is set out in the document.