I thank the First Minister for providing us with a copy of the Welsh Government's updated coronavirus control plan. First Minister, Wales now has the worst infection rates in the UK, and, over the last seven days, the rolling infection rate per 100,000 was 450.4. Wales wide, the testing positivity rate was nearly 20 per cent, and this is despite Wales being under the level 3 restrictions outlined in the Welsh Government's plans, and despite coming out of a national lockdown just a few weeks ago, which we all thought would help keep the virus under control. However, infections continued to rise despite control measures. 

So, we have to ask ourselves why control measures are not controlling the virus. And there's nothing new in the plans, because we're being asked to support the same course of action that we have been pursuing for the past nine months: various stages of lockdown, the same thing that we have been doing since the summer with little apparent success; plans that have been tried and failed elsewhere—the same plans but different names, because where England has tiers and Scotland has protection levels, Wales will now have alert levels. I feel this will just add confusion to a public already struggling to understand the different rules and regulations in place in different parts of the United Kingdom.

As the Welsh Government point out in their document, a single national approach is more likely to be understood and more effective, so why, then, are we not pursuing a single UK-wide approach to this virus? Each part of the UK is trying to do their own thing, and what that has achieved is the confusion of the general public. Some people still don't know what the rules are, and, as a result, we are seeing falling levels of adherence to those rules. We will not control this pandemic without the engagement and support of the public, who are, at the moment, frustrated. 

All we have seen is business closures, job losses, massive Government debt that will take generations to repay. The business rates still remain the same, in many cases. We should be concentrating our efforts on having a world-class track and trace system, on population-level testing to find those who are infected and infectious, and on ensuring that those people are isolated and unable to infect anyone else. We need to ensure that we are fully backward tracing, not just finding those an infected person has already been in contact with, but finding where they were infected in the first place. We know that you're more likely to pick up COVID at a superspreader event, and we need to identify these events and all those who were present at that event. I feel this is the only way we can control the virus. We break the chain of infection by ensuring the infectious are not allowed contact with the uninfected, not by instituting lockdowns and praying people will abide by the rules. We have to keep the public on side. Thank you.