7. Will the First Minister provide an update on support for European Union citizens living in Wales? OQ56244

Llywydd, the Welsh Government continues to fund services that provide advice and assistance to EU citizens in Wales. This includes support with making applications for settled status, and other general and specialist advice, covering a wide range of issues, from social welfare benefits to employment and workplace matters.

Thank you for that answer, First Minister. As you know, Wales is home, and has been for some time, to people from right across the EU; they've established their families here, brought their families up, they've rooted themselves in our culture in Wales, and, I have to say, have enriched it with theirs as well. Many of them have worked throughout this pandemic to keep our key services running, and yet—and yet—we know that there are still too many who've not yet applied for settled status. So, with the slightly worrying development last week that the UK Government is offering, bizarrely, financial incentives to EU citizens to leave the UK, will you ensure that we are doing all that we can in Wales and all that you can as a Welsh Government to ensure that EU citizens living here are aware of their rights, aware of how to secure settled status, and, crucially, are told clearly that this is their home and they're very, very welcome here?

Well, Llywydd, I completely agree with Huw Irranca-Davies. It has surely been one of our great success stories that we have persuaded people from other parts of the world to come and make their future part of our future here in Wales. And they bring with them, as Huw Irranca-Davies said, not simply the skills that they bring and the economic opportunities that they help us to create, but they bring that cultural richness that comes from having people from other parts of the world part of Welsh society and Welsh communities. And it is a mixed message, to put it at its politest, that the UK Government, while on the one hand claiming to encourage EU nationals to stay here in Wales, quietly slips out the fact that those people are now to be treated within the UK Government's voluntary return scheme. Well, we can't have it both ways, Llywydd. Either we are all working hard to encourage them to stay, or we're putting in arrangements to help them to leave. And here in Wales, we want to encourage them to stay, for all the reasons that Huw Irranca-Davies has said. It's why we have put £2 million of Welsh Government money into specialist advice to help people with settled status applications; it's why we've extended the contract with the Citizens Advice bureaux to the end of June to make sure that they're there right up to the last minute, helping people with what they need.

And my view is that the date by which settled status can be applied for should be extended beyond 30 June. What we are learning is that, in the coronavirus context, for people who have language challenges, trying to do it remotely, trying to do it over the phone, trying to do it by filling in forms—it is putting barriers in the paths of people who want to stay and whom we want to stay, but where face-to-face advice has been much more difficult to organise. Just more time to allow those people to complete the process in the way that the UK Government says they would wish to see would be to everybody's benefit, and we continue to make sure that we make that case to the UK Government, because we want to see those people who make such a positive contribution to Welsh life able to go on doing so.

Finally, question 8, Mandy Jones.