Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 8 December 2020.
I thank Carwyn Jones for that supplementary question. He's absolutely right—in dentistry, 17 per cent of all dentists currently registered with the General Dental Council come from Europe. That percentage is higher in the larger, corporate companies who supply a large percentage of dental services. It's estimated that dentists who are recruited from the European Union provide as much as 30 per cent of all NHS dental treatment here in Wales, and those people have already stopped coming, Llywydd. That is the point, isn't it? They don't believe that they will be welcome in the United Kingdom of the sort that Mr Reckless would wish to devise. He'd rather they weren't here and they hear that message from him and, as a result, they have stopped coming. They had no certainty over their employment, they had no certainty over their residence, they faced the declining value of the pound as a result of the way that Brexit has been navigated by this Government.
I think I referred last time, Llywydd, to a meeting that I attended, led by the then First Minister. It was in his office with the first Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis. The then First Minister put a series of really important points to the Secretary of State about the Irish border, about Welsh ports, about the recruitment to public services. Carwyn Jones in his supplementary question referred to ineptitude and naivety. Well, it was fully on display that day. We were told that this would be the easiest negotiation that we had ever entered into, that the United Kingdom knew what we were doing and those foreigners would fall apart as soon as we put our demands on the table. How wrong he turned out to be.