8. Will the Minister make a statement on health protection measures in Blaenau Gwent? OQ55955

Further to the national guidelines introduced following the firebreak, the Gwent-wide incident management team has developed a comprehensive action plan for community intervention. All of our partners on the ground are working hard together to reduce rates of infection, and we all have a responsibility to support them in their efforts.

I'm grateful to you for that, Minister, and I join the tone of exchanges this afternoon, where we all welcome the news about the vaccine being made available, and we look forward to that radically changing the health situation in Blaenau Gwent and elsewhere. But in the meantime, of course, today we've seen numbers of the infection that demonstrate that Blaenau Gwent is again near the top of these rates in Wales. And I recognise what the Government is doing in terms of regulations, and we debated that yesterday; we'll debate it again next week. But the regulations alone I don't believe are going to be sufficient to deliver the sort of reduction in numbers that we require and we need in Blaenau Gwent to keep people safe.

And I'd like to ask the Minister what consideration he is giving to the sort of mass testing that we're seeing across our county borders in Cynon and in Merthyr, and also greater enforcement. I think one of the frustrations that's come through over recent days is that people are working really, really hard to stay within the regulations, to ensure that they're keeping people safe, but that enforcement isn't taking place in a sufficiently robust way to ensure that everybody does that. So, what can the Welsh Government do to ensure that we have a more holistic approach to policy in places like Blaenau Gwent?  

We are certainly trying to take a holistic approach with all the tools and capacity that we have available to us, and the reality is that there are limits on that capacity in different places. So, I know—and I've said this before and I'll say it again—that environmental health officers, employees of local government, have been a huge part of keeping Wales safe. They've been at the front line of enforcement, but also engagement with businesses, to help support them to improve their practice. There is a limited number of environmental health officers and, if we could, we'd significantly expand the workforce, but there aren't lots of extra people.

What we did do—and there's credit to local government leaders and the Minister, Julie James—is we agreed to have a process where people agreed to recruit extra people together to try to make sure that 22 authorities weren't competing with each other to get the same people. But, even with that, those officers are exhausted—they really haven't stopped. So, I'm grateful to them, but I recognise that we can't simply demand more of them and tell them to keep going and to run faster because we need them to. So, there's a challenge here in what we're able to do, and I think you're right when you say that the rules and regulations are not enough on their own—they're certainly not, and that's why the choices we make are so important. So, the choices that you make in how you live your life, the choices that your constituents and my constituents make about who they see, how often they see them, what environment they see them in, will make a really big difference as to whether we can help to reduce those rates down, not just in Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen, Merthyr and the Cynon, but right across the country, because the overall rate for Wales is over 220 today, and that should give all of us real cause for concern. It's certainly a matter of great concern to me.

And I do think that we will positively learn from both Merthyr and Cynon. The chief medical officer has already asked for some reflective work to be done on the early experience, what we've learnt from both Liverpool and Sheffield. We already know that we're getting more people come through from the more advantaged populations—the wealthier groups of people are coming through in larger number and proportion—so, actually, we still need to do something about that to make sure that we're not seeing, if you like, the inverse care law taking place in front of us.

But also I'm really keen to learn from the testing around schools, because the three secondary schools in Merthyr have been really positive about wanting their students and their staff to get tested, so we'll get more of a whole-population segment with that testing, and the further education college too. People can, again, learn from that. I've talked with the health board and others about the possibility, if mass testing were to carry on, of whether Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen would be the next candidates, but we expect the vaccine to come within days. Our target date is that we want to be in a position to start that immunisation by Tuesday next week. So, we're going to see hope coming down towards us, but it does mean that we all need to do the right thing for a few months more, and, if we can do that, then we can look forward to a much better future, to learn more about the length of time that the vaccines will give us. But once we've had whole-population coverage once, we will have more confidence about doing it again, with the long, difficult road of recovery that faces all of us when the pandemic is finally over.

Minister, pubs and restaurants have done an incredible job of adapting and introducing health protection measures into their businesses and at speed during this pandemic, such as hand sanitisers, social distancing and track and trace recording. Will you join me in thanking them for the hard work that they've put in to making us all safer? And do you agree that the banning of the sale of alcohol in these relatively safe environments will force people to buy alcohol in supermarkets, drink at home, possibly in numbers that exceed Welsh Government guidelines, with the risk of spreading the virus further?

Well, I am tremendously grateful to people right across the hospitality industry for the way they have changed and adapted. And I have real sympathy for the incredibly difficult time that they face. We wanted to leave the firebreak with a pattern that would get us through to the end of the year, but I said, as the First Minister said, that, if the rates change, we may need to act again. And as I've just said in response to Alun Davies's question, the rates in Wales today are over 220 per 100,000. So, the opportunity to go through to the end of the year without further intervention is not available to us, and we then had to decide what to do.

Look, I know that it isn't easy to turn a profit in the hospitality sector. I know that, often, these are small businesses, family businesses, and people have a very personal connection to their business. I also know that this is a sector that employs lots of younger people, who've had many of the ways in which they live their lives and enjoy their lives significantly affected by the pandemic, and it is not a choice that Ministers have gone into glibly or with a care-free attitude. Eluned Morgan, who's in the Chamber with us today, has had many of those conversations with the hospitality sector. She's been our lead Minister working with the sector, and it's difficult. And we all understand why they're so upset, and why wouldn't they be? We're having significant restrictions introduced into that sector, and we know that that will cause harm. And yet we also know that doing nothing isn't an option. The evidence we have is that tier 3-style restrictions in England and Scotland have the best prospect of controlling coronavirus. The significant difference in terms of where Wales is today and tier 3 in England or Scotland is hospitality. And you'll have heard the chief medical officer on the radio this morning talking about the fact that Wales, at present, is an outlier in having a much more generous approach when it comes to hospitality and alcohol, and it wasn't tenable to carry on in that way. And the evidence is there, from experience within the British isles—so, Governments and countries that we can compare ourselves much more easily with—where those restrictions have had an impact. We shared that information with them; I know Eluned Morgan spent time talking with them, not just through the last few weeks, but the last few days, in running through the evidence with them. There's reluctance, yes, and why wouldn't they be reluctant? But there is some understanding that we do need to act.

I don't enjoy standing up and advocating restrictions to the way people live their lives and the way businesses operate, but I'm afraid the evidence is there that, if we don't do this, if we don't adopt the evidence of what's worked in other parts of the UK, then we'll be having a different conversation in a few weeks about why the Government, despite that evidence, despite the evidence from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies and the paper that we'll shortly publish from our own technical advisory cell—why we chose not to act. There'll be a different toll for us to look at then, and it's not one that I'm prepared to sign up to.

And, finally, question 9—Joyce Watson.