3. Statement by the First Minister: Health Protection Measures Post Firebreak

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:29 pm on 3 November 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 3:29, 3 November 2020

Llywydd, diolch yn fawr to Alun Davies. I absolutely recognise what he said about the way so many businesses have worked so hard to make sure that they can continue in these difficult times, but to do it in a way that is safe for their staff and for their users, and that is the experience of most businesses in Wales. Where there are businesses who don't operate in that way, then the Welsh Government will take action against them, because that is not fair, both to their staff and to their users, but it's not fair to other businesses either, who have made the effort that we asked them to make. 

And in terms of fairness, let me say as well that, not only has the uncertainty about the furlough scheme been deeply unhelpful, but the fact that when we asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer to give some flexibility to businesses in Wales as we went into our firebreak period, we were told that that was impossible, but when the English Government, in that capacity, decided to introduce a lockdown, suddenly all that was possible after all. And what strikes people in Wales about that is that it simply is not fair when one part of the United Kingdom is denied help and another part has it available to them. The Treasury is the Treasury for the whole of the United Kingdom, not just one part of it, and it needs to recapture some ground that it has lost because of the way in which it has behaved in that partisan way over recent weeks. 

I completely agree with Alun Davies that the TTP system has been a great success story here in Wales. Every pound that we put into it goes into the public service. There's no money skimmed off the top of it for private profit making, as there inevitably is in England. And that is because of our values, because we believe that this is a public service best provided by people who work in the public service, and with that public service ethos, but it gives us value for money, as you heard as well. Now, we will continue to recruit more people in our local teams. We will provide that surge capacity I mentioned earlier. And as we come out of the firebreak period, we will look again to the enormous efforts our TTP teams have made, doing more in backward tracing, now having a new set of tools, both to persuade people to self-isolate, and to explain to them the consequences of not doing so, and to prepare for the time when, as I say, a new generation of tests may become available that could allow us to reduce the length of time that we ask people to self-isolate and that could allow us to do more in asymptomatic testing, as Adam Price mentioned earlier. And all of that thought is going on as we speak in our TTP system, so that we use this 17 days of the firebreak not just to gather our breath in TTP, but to prepare for new possibilities and an even bigger contribution that it could make here in Wales in the future.