6. What have the Welsh Government’s international priorities been during the COVID-19 pandemic? OQ56291

During the early months of the pandemic, our international activity included obtaining PPE and assisting the UK Government to help Welsh citizens return home from abroad. The recently published international action plans set out our priorities in supporting Wales's recovery from the pandemic.

Thank you for that answer, First Minister. As the UK has left the European Union, I certainly think it is now vital that Wales establishes its own role in the world as a nation as of right. The Welsh Conservative Party have made it clear that they would massively restrict the ability of the Welsh Government to engage with other countries by cutting the funding to those areas that are not overtly devolved, effectively gagging Wales's voice in the world and preventing us from speaking up for our nation and businesses overseas. It's clear to the majority of us here that this approach would have massively hampered the benefits that international co-operation has brought to Wales, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic. So, First Minister, during this pandemic, what role has Wales played internationally and what are the Welsh Government's ambitions for future international engagement and international co-operation?

I thank Mick Antoniw for that question. He's absolutely right; there's never been a more important time to sustain the profile and the reputation of Wales abroad. We remain an outward-looking, international nation, and that has been very important to us during the coronavirus crisis, directly in the contacts that the chief medical officer has had with colleagues in South Korea and Sweden and in the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, for example, and in the work that Public Health Wales has done alongside the World Health Organization. It has been very important, I believe, to have sustained our links with key international networks over the past 12 months.

I'm grateful to the Member for representing Wales at the last meeting of the UK Committee of the Regions contact group, and grateful to David Rees and to Russell George for agreeing to be representatives for Wales in those future arrangements. We haven't stepped back during the past 12 months from our involvement, for example, in chairing the Vanguard Initiative, an initiative amongst a series of regional Governments looking at smart specialisation and capitalising on the strength that we have in south-east Wales in particular. I know that Mick Antoniw will have paid particularly close attention to the continuing actions we have taken through the Wales and Africa programme, the PONT group in his own constituency having played such an important part in all of that.

I expect that to be part of the rest of this calendar year as well. In the last couple of months, I have met ambassadors from Japan, the President of the Basque Country, the ambassador from Germany, I met the foreign and defence Minister of the Republic of Ireland, I am to meet the New Zealand high commissioner tomorrow—all of these contacts demonstrate that there is an appetite in the rest of the world to maintain their contact with Wales. That is essential to us in terms of future trade opportunities and cultural exchange, and in terms of making sure that Wales's reputation in the rest of the world is powerfully sustained. I thank the Member for the contribution that he has made to all of that throughout this Senedd term.