Dog Thefts

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:11 pm on 16 March 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:11, 16 March 2021

Llywydd, I thank Jack Sargeant for that. We've been just discussing the pandemic's impact here in Wales, and this question is connected to it as well. We know that in the conditions of having to work from home and stay at home, many families have acquired pets, and that means that the opportunity for criminal action has arisen because the prices of dogs have risen very fast over the last 12 months. And it is disgraceful, I agree absolutely with Jack Sargeant, that people should seek to exploit people's vulnerabilities in that way.

We have conversations, of course, with our police and crime commissioners and police forces. It's very good to see that Dyfed-Powys Police has recently appointed a chief inspector to head their task force on this matter. But our police forces are stretched in all directions, and policing the pandemic and dealing with volumes of crimes that have not abated, in many ways, during it, create enormous pressures for them and those pressures are exacerbated by a decade of cuts, a decade of Tory cuts in police forces, numbers reduced year after year after year.

The Welsh Government stepped in—as Jack Sargeant will know, and his father was very much part of this—stepped in to fund 500 police community support officers here in Wales, to allow our local forces to have more people on the ground in communities able to deal with issues like dog theft and the impact that that has on families. I know that the Conservative Party has committed itself to ensuring that were they to have any part to play in the next Senedd Government, that no funding would be provided for non-devolved matters. Well, that's the end of 500 police support officers in Wales, because we have put our money in to protect communities where the Conservative Government has failed, and if we're returned to Government after 6 May, then people in Wales can know that those beat officers—the people they meet day in, day out in their communities—they will be safe with a Labour Government, even while the Tories here in Wales are determined to defund them.