Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:22 pm on 20 October 2020.
Diolch, Llywydd. And I'm going to speak in support of this firebreak that will be introduced on Friday. I do recognise that it's absolutely necessary. I have listened to the debate and there have been some excellent statements, and, unfortunately, not such excellent statements that have been made here today.
I want to also make it very clear that it isn't just the Labour Party who are supporting this, but also to make sure that others understand that Plaid Cymru and other Members of the Cabinet who don't belong to Labour—Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas and Kirsty Williams—will also be supporting it, because I think that's important. But what is also important here is that it is very clear that we need to act quickly to protect people and to protect services.
I cover rural Wales—I'm sitting here in Pembrokeshire today—and I've heard Paul Davies, who also represents Pembrokeshire, and I've heard Russell George, who represents Powys, who are claiming that there is very little support in low areas of infection for this type of action. Well, I can tell those that the people—. I haven't even had to speak to people—they have come up to me and asked for action, because they recognise, quite rightly, that in a rural area the services can go from coping to being vulnerable in a very short time. We don't have very large-scale hospitals, so we don't need very large-scale outbreaks to overwhelm those services.
I've also listened, quite rightly, to those same individuals asking for us to reopen the healthcare sector to non-COVID cases. That is exactly what has started to happen. They've been at meetings, with me and Neil Hamilton, where that has been said. We can't do two things with the system in rural areas, and that is to allow the COVID infection rate to go up and, at the same time, to keep the non-COVID services open. I'm also going to take issue with the fact that when, last week, the First Minister quite rightly asked the UK Government to put in some action that prevented people from, wherever they lived, and, of course, England, because they were in charge of that—they made it an English-Welsh issue. I think that that was really bad form. And what I think is bad form here is they're trying to make it a rural/urban issue today, and that, again, doesn't take forward what we are all trying to do here, which is to ask everybody who has already acted responsibly to carry on acting responsibly, that it's a one-nation approach. I'm sure we've heard 'a one-nation approach' somewhere else before. Well, it would be rather nice if we had a one-nation approach now. That is what I ask of my colleagues to do here today.
I also recognise that there will be a need for those people who will feel the isolation more than others, and I'm really pleased to hear that single households will be able to have the support that they need, and that was in recognition of what happened before. So, we have learnt some lessons from what we put in place before.
I'm also very pleased that Armistice Day remembrance services will be able to take place, albeit in a limited form. I think that what is clearly going to happen is that those businesses who do keep open, and particularly supermarkets—what I request is that people treat the staff with the dignity and respect that they will deserve, because there's an awful lot of evidence that has come out already where that hasn't been the case. So, I put that in there now.
But I think that it's time to recognise that being in Government does mean taking the right action. It means taking it at the right time, and I respectfully ask the Tories to recognise that now is the right time, that we have clarity not calamity in Wales, that we're putting public health at the forefront and not politics. I did hear last week with some dismay where David Rowlands did say, and it's been repeated here again today by others, that there are very few people who will suffer the consequence should they catch or be unlucky enough to contract COVID and that they are the vulnerable, and they are the elderly, and that, somehow, if we isolated those two groups, the rest could carry on. I think that that—