Questions now from the party leaders. The leader of the Welsh Conservatives, Andrew R.T. Davies. 

Thank you, Presiding Officer, and, with your permission, I'd just like to put on the record that our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the three fishermen who are still classed as missing off the north Wales coast, and our gratitude to the search and rescue teams who have been out tirelessly trying to give some comfort to those families in trying to seek out their loved ones. I'm sure all Members' thoughts and prayers are with the families of Alan Minard, Ross Ballantine and Carl McGrath, who are still listed as missing off the north Wales coast.  

First Minister, could you tell me the current state of the pandemic? Because in your earlier response to the question from Suzy Davies, you clearly indicated that we have a long way to go before we can declare the pandemic at an end. We had the Office for National Statistics figures out today about deaths in Wales, and in particular in north Wales, each and every one a tragedy, and our thoughts are with the families who've lost loved ones. And today we have the assessment on the new mutant strain of the Kent variant. So, I think it's important for us to try and understand what your assessment is of the current pandemic and the journey we have to continue on here in Wales.

I thank Andrew R.T. Davies for those questions and of course associate myself with what he said in opening about the families of those three men who are missing at sea in north Wales. I know there will be people right across Wales who have followed the events in north Wales, including the enormous efforts that have been made to locate the people who are missing, and to offer, as Andrew R.T. Davies said, comfort to their families. This must be the most awful time for them.

My assessment of the state of the pandemic in Wales is this: because of the decisions that were taken to put Wales into a level 4 series of measures before Christmas, we are seeing the benefit of that in the period since the turn of the year. The number of people suffering from coronavirus is going down every day. It's down below 140 per 100,000 today. The positivity rate is going down every day, down to just about 11 per cent today. The number of people in our hospitals with coronavirus has started to come down—it's not down anything like enough, but the trend is now downwards—and we've seen the first impact of that in our critical care capacity as well. All of those are very important achievements, and, alongside the mass vaccination programme, give us hope that, as we go further into this year, it will be possible to restore some of the freedoms to people in Wales that they have had to manage without over recent weeks. But all of that is based on foundations that can shift at any moment, and the examples that the leader of the opposition pointed to—the Kent variant and developments there, the South African variant—while things are moving in the right direction, there's a fragility about all of that. And we've seen, in other parts of the world, including parts of the world very close to us, how a set of promising indicators can turn into a set of very difficult indicators in a matter of just a few short weeks.

I'd agree with your assessment, First Minister; there is some light at the end of the tunnel with some of the numbers that are moving in the right direction now, but we still have a very long, long way to go with this pandemic, and it is right that we adhere to the restrictions and we do all we can as we go into the spring.

What concerns me greatly is when Government Ministers make commitments during this pandemic, such as those the environment Minister has made throughout the pandemic—on seven occasions in the Plenary. Back to 7 May last year, when talking about nitrate vulnerable zones, she said she would not be bringing them forward while we're in the current pandemic period. On 16 September, she said:

'What I have committed to is not bringing them forward whilst we're in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic.' 

On seven occasions she said that she would not bring the NVZ regulations forward for adoption here in Wales, and last week she issued a statement where she contradicted herself and said she was implementing these NVZ regulations as of 1 April. Would you personally intervene, First Minister, remind the Minister of the commitments that she's made to farmers and the rural economy and to the people of Wales by her comments on the floor of the Plenary, and withhold introducing these regulations until the pandemic is clearly confirmed as being at an end and preparations can be in place to adopt these regulations, if they are approved by the Assembly?

I won't be doing that, Llywydd. We have waited before introducing the regulations until, as I set out in my answer to the first question from Andrew R.T. Davies, the fact that we are moving into, we hope, more benign times as far as the virus is concerned. The need to put control on agricultural pollution in Wales is urgent—three incidents on average every week in each of the last three years. Over 90 per cent of ammonia emissions in Wales are from agriculture. The level of pollution incidents in the agriculture sphere is damaging the reputation of farmers, damaging our environment and damaging the ability of that industry in the longer run to trade with other parts of the world, given that the strength of our industry is the quality of the produce that it delivers. Now is the right time to do this, and delay would not be in the interests of the industry. The implementation of the regulations will be done sensitively, they'll be done alongside the industry, but further delay is neither environmentally, economically or in reputational terms to the advantage of the industry.

With respect, First Minister, I'd agree with you that one pollution incident is one too many, and as someone who is involved in the agriculture industry, I want to see an industry that has as clean a bill of health as possible. But I go back to the point that I've said to you; I've offered you examples where the Minister is on the record as saying that these NVZ regulations would not be introduced while the pandemic was in existence—not once, not twice, but seven times in response to questions in the Plenary that I have a direct record of here. You say that

'When we make a promise, we know in the Labour party that we have to keep it.'

I would suggest that when a Minister of your Government makes such a commitment on the floor of the Plenary, that is a promise, and this promise is being broken. There is no dispute about pressing down on pollution incidents and making sure we bear down on the people who break the regulations, but when the Minister's made such a commitment, and you have made such a statement that when the Labour party makes a promise it has to keep it, surely these promises have to be kept, and we have to come to the end of the pandemic before these regulations are implemented.

The promise that my party makes is that we will deal with agricultural pollution here in Wales. We have reached the point where I believe, and the Minister believes, that we can put these regulations before the Senedd. We can do so confident that we have worked hard with the industry, and that when it comes to implementing the regulations, we will do that alongside those many, many farmers in Wales who already comply with regulations, who don't pollute our natural environment, and who are let down by those who do. If these were entirely isolated incidents, or even if the incidents were falling, I'd have more sympathy with that the Member has said. In fact, we have seen no diminution in the rate of agricultural pollution. We don't just see one, we see three every single week, week in, week out, year in, year out, here in Wales, in a way that damages the industry and damages the environment that belongs to us all. That is why we will bring forward the regulations. That is the spirit in which we will approach it and we are doing the right thing by the industry and by Wales.

Leader of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price.

Thank you, Llywydd. May I, first of all, echo the comments made earlier and say that our thoughts and prayers are with the families of Alan Minard, Ross Ballantine and Carl McGrath at this very difficult time?

First Minister, the Scottish Government is providing £90 million in extra funding to councils to enable them to freeze council tax next year, offsetting what would have been, on average, a 3 per cent increase. It would cost around £100 million to allow Welsh councils to freeze council tax next year and offset the average 4.8 per cent rise that we saw last year. At this time of great financial uncertainty, are you attracted by the argument of, and following Scotland's lead in, at the same time protecting vital, local services, but also protecting family budgets at such a difficult time? Would you be in a better position to do so if you were able to convince Westminster to allow greater flexibility in carrying unspent money forward to next year?

Of course I see the attraction of what has been proposed for Scotland, but it's £100 million, as the Member has mentioned. Week after week, he puts to me propositions for spending that cost tens or hundreds of millions of pounds. What we have in Wales is the council tax benefit scheme, a unique scheme in Wales, in which we topped up as a Welsh Government the £220 million that we were provided with by the Westminster Government when, against our wishes, devolution of council tax benefit was carried out. We've added fresh Government money to that this year—another £5.4 million, I think—to make sure that that scheme can go on being operated. Over 300,000 families in Wales benefit from it, the vast bulk of them paying no council tax at all. That is a way, I think, of protecting those people who most need protection against rising bills at times of restraint, while requiring others of us to make a contribution that we can better make to sustain public services here in Wales. So, we have our own way of doing it, and I think it has many advantages. As to Mr Price's final point, I do agree with him there. We have asked the UK Government, as has the Government in Scotland and the Northern Ireland Executive, for simple flexibilities to allow us to manage end-of-year expenditure in this extraordinary time. Sadly, we don't appear to be gaining any traction with them.

Obviously, the additional £5.5 million increase to the council tax reduction scheme that you referred to, First Minister, is welcome, but it's lower than the increase in council tax arrears, and the people who are most likely to have gone into arrears are those affected by coronavirus, households with children, people with disabilities. Freezing council tax is a short-term measure, though I'm sure it would be very welcome to many of those families; the longer term solution is to reform what the Institute for Fiscal Studies has called an out-of-date, regressive and distortionary council tax system. Why have you allowed this unfair system to persist for so long? 

I agree that the system needs reform. The report that the Member quotes is part of the research that this Government has commissioned into the current system to give us proposals as to how it might be reformed. There are very important choices, challenging choices, for anybody who wishes to bring about reform in the current system to grapple with, whether—and this is what the IFS report is primarily about—we should take some radical action to make the current system of council tax fairer and more progressive, including a rebanding exercise, or whether it is better to think of a different system altogether. Very significant work has gone on over the last few years through the Welsh Government to look at whether land value taxation would offer a better model altogether, even than a reformed council tax system drawing on the work of the IFS. So, this Government has been on the case of reform here throughout this Senedd term, making sure that there are practical proposals that can be implemented if a mandate for that is secured at the forthcoming Senedd elections.

You and I have talked about this very issue before, but the question is, of course, what are we going to do now. What we would do in Government is to undertake to revalue more regularly and ensure that the council tax system is more proportional to the value of properties. We know in Blaenau Gwent, for example, we've seen the value of properties increase more than twice as much compared to Wrexham, and properties are increasingly arbitrary in terms of the difference in taxation. And we expect our proposals—. Under our proposals, 20 per cent of households in the bottom fifth of income distribution would see their council tax fall by more than £200, and the IFS report that you referred to shows that that would mean an average bill falling in somewhere like Merthyr Tydfil by £160. That's the medium-term solution. The longer term answer, as you say, absolutely is to replace it with an entirely fairer system related to land value. First Minister, where are you in terms of the medium and long-term vision?

Well, I thank the Member for that question and I look forward to going on discussing these matters with him, because they are genuinely serious and they're genuinely challenging in a policy sense. I am attracted not just to regular revaluation but rolling revaluation, in which it would be possible to have a register that is kept up to date all the time so that you don't get the distortions that we see when revaluations are postponed over many years. That will require a different relationship with the Valuation Office Agency, and quite possibly a separate valuation system for Wales, where we're not reliant on the current arrangements. 

The Member quotes the figures from the IFS report about what revaluation and other reforms might mean for people at the bottom end of the income scale, but he doesn't quote the fact that, for people at the top end of the property valuations, that could mean thousands of pounds in additional bills every year. And not everybody who lives in a big house, as he knows, is somebody with a big income. So, there will be a need for very considerable transition arrangements to be put in place in order to protect those who would be adversely affected and don't have incomes to fall back on; albeit that they're asset rich, they're cash poor. So, it will be more complicated than headlines that say that some parts of Wales will be better off, because the system will have to be navigated through in a way that is fair to everybody, and it will not be as simple, I'm afraid, as some of the slogans will suggest.