Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:05 pm on 1 December 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:05, 1 December 2020

Well, Llywydd, I think it is helpful to have different approaches and different ideas rehearsed. I think, though, that all that would happen would be that one set of anomalies would be substituted by a different set of anomalies, because there is no getting away from the fact that, in the complex systems that we have to implement, there are always marginal things that can be pointed at and people can say, 'Why is this allowed when that's not allowed? Why can't I do this when the evidence for this is that it is safe?' Those anomalies are just unavoidable when you are trying to respond to the complexity of the position that we face today. The course of action that the Member has advocated, which, as I say, I think is a useful contribution to the debate and thinking about all of this, would simply lead us into a different set of compromises, a different set of anomalies. There is no getting away from the fact that, when you're trying to devise responses to the rapidly changing and very challenging set of circumstances we face, it isn't possible to have a logic that is watertight on every single occasion and in every single aspect. What we have to ask people to do is to take the package as a whole, and the package as a whole is designed here in Wales to put us back in a position where the numbers of cases of coronavirus can be coped with by our health service, that the health service can go on doing all the other things that we need it to, where lives will be saved. That is the prize that all of us have to keep in front of us.