Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 16 March 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:51, 16 March 2021

Well, Llywydd, those are also important points. I'm very glad the social care forum has been hard at work on this agenda. The work of the social partnership council, Llywydd, when we come to reflect on this extraordinary 12 months, I think will stand out as a way of working here in Wales that genuinely brings all interested parties around the table together. It's met every fortnight, it set up the social care forum as part of those arrangements, and I think they will be shown to have stood us in very good stead.

My ambition beyond coronavirus is absolutely to build back fairer, because if we don't build back fairer we certainly will not be building back better. And coronavirus has exposed—absolutely exposed—those deep, underlying unfairnesses and inequalities that are there in Welsh society and which have been exacerbated during a decade of deliberate austerity. What we now need to see is a Government at Westminster that is prepared, as we come out of all of this, not to heap the responsibility for it on the shoulders of those on whom we've relied the most during the last 12 months, and yet I fear very much that that is what we will see. And instead of inequalities being eroded, the Welsh Government will once again be faced with trying to do everything we can do to mitigate the impacts of a UK Government whose actions simply add to rather than address the structural impacts that we have seen drawn to the surface during the pandemic.