Questions now from the party leaders. Plaid Cymru leader, Adam Price.

Diolch, Llywydd. First Minister, today we mark the very sombre anniversary of the first recorded death as a result of COVID-19 in Wales. You've talked about the need for a future public inquiry that will seek to identify lessons from the last 12 months. Do you share the view, as I do, recently expressed by Sir Mansel Aylward, that one of the clear lessons is that there was a failure to properly plan and prepare for the pandemic? Specifically, do you think that the emphasis on influenza to the exclusion of coronaviruses like severe acute respiratory syndrome or middle east respiratory syndrome in the pandemic plan led to some of the early mistakes in the response? The science around a flu pandemic suggested it was very, very difficult, or even futile, to try and suppress community transmission once it's become endemic, which isn't the case, as we now know, with COVID. Does that explain the two principal mistakes early on—the failure to adopt lockdown restrictions sufficiently early and the abandonment of community test and trace, later readopted, of course?

Well, Llywydd, let me thank Adam Price for drawing attention to the very sober and sombre day it is when we mark the anniversary of the first death from coronavirus here in Wales, an experience that has been repeated for far, far too many families. I was very glad today to be able to make the announcement of commemorative woodland, in both north and south Wales, where families who have experienced that loss will be able to have permanent memorial to that awful experience. Mr Price is right as well, Llywydd, to point to the fact that pandemic planning across the United Kingdom had largely focused on influenza, and the lessons that were drawn from earlier experiences of that.

I think it is too early to talk of mistakes and to attributing causes to things that could have been done differently. I'm quite sure that things would have been done differently if we knew then what we know now. So, that's not in any way to deny that things could have been done differently. Being able to say, 'It was because if this, or because of that, and, if we'd known, we'd have done something differently'—I think that's much harder to be definitive. There needs to be an inquiry. That inquiry needs to be on a UK basis, otherwise it will never make sense of the experience here in Wales in a full way, and it needs to be done at a time when the system—which is still focused, every single day, on dealing with the very real impacts of the public health emergency—has the space it needs to be able to think about and contribute to the questions that such an inquiry will rightly raise.

Many people, First Minister, are pointing to the way in which COVID-19 has highlighted and further exacerbated existing health inequalities that the Welsh health and social care policy forum, which draw together the leading organisations in the sector in Wales, have written to you, asking you to commit to a cross-Government strategy to reduce these inequalities, addressing the deeper social determinants of ill health, poor housing, gaps in educational opportunity and the prior pandemic of poverty that has scarred too many people in Wales for far too long.

The announcement that you just referred to—the creation of a living memorial to those who have lost their lives—I think is very thoughtful and very welcome, but would it not be an even greater memorial for us to resolve together to end child hunger and poverty, to end homelessness and poor housing, and end poverty pay, beginning with key workers, as a sign of our collective determination not to go back to how things were before?

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.  

First Minister, you previously said that you share my party's ambition of paying care workers fairly, with a guaranteed minimum wage of £10 an hour, but that can only happen, you said, if your party at Westminster succeeds in persuading the UK Government to adopt such a policy. Surely we can't afford to outsource such a fundamental decision to a UK Tory Government—they're never going to build back fairer, are they? Twenty-five years ago, we used to talk about the devolution dividend as one of the core arguments for the creation of this institution, the Senedd. Isn't it time that that dividend was paid to this group of workers? So, will you commit to funding social care, First Minister, sufficiently, so that all care workers can at least receive the real living wage, as an embodiment of the new Wales we should endeavour to create as a positive legacy of this awful pandemic?

Well, first of all, Llywydd, let me say that the devolution dividend is there every day in the experience of Welsh citizens, and there in a way that directly addresses inequalities as well. People here in Wales who are in low pay don't pay for their prescriptions, whereas, across the border, they're paying nearly £9 for every item. There's no tax on sickness here in Wales, and that's a devolution dividend. In this Senedd term, we have created the most generous childcare offer anywhere in the United Kingdom, again so that working families know that they can go to work and deal with and have at their disposal quality childcare for young people as they are in those formative years. We still have free breakfasts in our primary schools—again, absolutely aimed at making sure that those children who came to school too hungry to learn have something in Wales that we know will prevent that from happening. The devolution dividend is there every single day in the lives of Welsh families. And as for social care workers, of course it's the ambition of this Government that our social care workers should be properly recognised and properly paid for the job they do. We were the first Government in the United Kingdom to pay £500 to social care workers in recognition of the extraordinary job they have done during the pandemic. Now that the Chancellor's budget is out of the way, then my colleague Rebecca Evans, with Julie Morgan and Vaughan Gething, are looking to see how we can use our budget to continue to advance our agenda of recognising and rewarding social care workers for the vital job they do here in Wales.

Leader of the Welsh Conservatives, Andrew R.T. Davies.

Thank you, Presiding Officer, and I identify myself with the comments of other leaders here this afternoon in reflecting on the year's anniversary since the first COVID death in Wales. Who would have thought, 12 months later, we would still tragically be seeing more deaths being reported from COVID, and continuing to go through the restrictions that are placed on all our everyday lives? I'd also like to ask the First Minister—. Because, as we come out of the COVID crisis, with the vaccine programme in full swing across the whole of the United Kingdom, on the continent of Europe, many leaders are now turning their back on the AstraZeneca vaccine and putting comments in the press that are deeply unhelpful to the roll-out of the vaccine—. You've used the rostrum here, or the lectern, should I say, to pass a message to the leaders on the continent of Europe when the Brexit discussions were in full flow. First Minister, what's your message to President Macron and Chancellor Merkel when they're talking negatively about the AstraZeneca vaccine? Because, until we have society across the world vaccinated, it's going to be increasingly difficult for us to get back to our normal lives. And what impact have you had—? What impact and assessment have you had made of the comments on the roll-out of the vaccine here in Wales—of the comments made in Europe?

Well, Llywydd, my message is to people here in Wales on this important issue, and my message to people in Wales is very simple: the Oxford vaccine is safe. The anxieties that have been expressed about it elsewhere are not shared by the medicines regulator here in Wales, they are not shared by the World Health Organization, they are not shared by the European Medicines Agency, and they are certainly not shared by our chief medical officer and our scientific advisers. The health Minister and I had an opportunity yesterday to test all this evidence directly with our chief medical officer, and we came away from that absolutely strengthened in our understanding that the blood clots that are talked about in newspapers—there is no more risk of a blood clot from having the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine than there would be in the population at large at any time. Blood clots occur all the time in the population, and the vaccine is not—is not—going to increase your risk of that. So, on the important point that Andrew R.T. Davies made, I don't want anybody in Wales who may be hesitant about the vaccine to become more hesitant because of the stories that they will have seen or heard.

The vaccination programme in Wales goes from strength to strength. We broke records twice in this last week, on Friday and on Saturday, in the reported numbers of people who were vaccinated in one day. Over 40,000 people in one day reported on Saturday—an extraordinary figure; over 1 per cent of the whole population of Wales coming forward for vaccination. That's what we need to see in the days and weeks ahead, and I know that that will be strongly supported by parties across this Chamber, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have reinforced those messages again this afternoon.

Thank you, First Minister. And I do welcome those positive comments, despite the negativity that is coming from other countries, and I hope that we can get back, in those countries, to a normal process of vaccination, because, as I said, unless we all adhere to the vaccination programme, we will all suffer lockdown measures going forward, as we're seeing in countries across Europe at the moment.

But I do want to bring you back to your own control plan, the coronavirus control plan, which you brought forward in December, and in particular that plan was predicated on the Kent variant being the dominant virus, which you identified on 21 December. The health Minister repeated this to me in January, when I was asking for a road map out of lockdown and, in particular, gateways of opportunity to open up the economy and open up society. You also repeated the importance of the coronavirus control plan to my colleague Laura Anne Jones in February, yet it is my understanding that the coronavirus control plan has now been put to one side and is awaiting an update. Why is it taking so long to update the coronavirus control plan, as it's been central to your thinking up until a few weeks ago? And can you, in the interest of transparency, publish all the updated guidelines that you're using when you're considering measures to unlock society as we go further into the spring and early summer?

Well, Llywydd, the control plan, the alert levels, were absolutely key to the announcement that I was able to make on Friday of last week: a very clear set of milestones for our education system, for our personal lives and in the business community, explaining how we hope to take advantage of the work that we have done together to suppress the virus here in Wales, to have more children back in school, more opportunities for people to meet, more businesses able to reopen again. I set out a series of dates, right up until 12 April, and indicated the issues that will be under consideration in the review period beyond that, provided conditions allow. All of that drew very heavily on the control plan.

We are in the process of updating some of the metrics in it to take full account of new variants and risks that still exist, because while numbers in Wales are currently falling, and the number of people in hospital is falling as well, none of us should turn our sight away from the risks that continue to be there. Three quarters of the countries of Europe reported rising coronavirus rates only last week, and here in Wales, we have some areas where numbers are not falling. So, while the position is, for the moment, and hopefully continuingly, heading in the right direction, it won't continue to do so if we don't attend to all the risks that continue to be there. The updated coronavirus plan will make sure that we have a properly balanced assessment, both of everything that has been achieved, of the positive impact that vaccination will continue to provide, but also that we do not put at risk everything that's been achieved by not being constantly vigilant about the risks that this virus can still pose to us all and to the lives of people here in Wales.

Thank you for that answer, First Minister. I am a little surprised at the importance you attached to the coronavirus control plan in last week's announcement, because the health Minister did confirm that the plan, as devised, was not being adhered to in the consideration of the plans you announced on Friday, and that update was alluded to by the Deputy Minister in his interview on the Politics Wales show on Sunday, which we're still waiting for. Can you confirm when that new plan will be available for us all to consider what matrix the Government are working to?

Importantly, when it comes to a public inquiry, you've made comments recently that you do not believe that a public inquiry would be appropriate to start before the pandemic has come to its natural conclusion, if indeed it ever does come to its conclusion. We've also learned from Carmarthenshire council, for example, that twice as many people died in care homes in the second wave of the coronavirus outbreak. So, it's really important that we do have an independent, thorough inquiry to look at all these aspects, so that we can plan for the future, learn the safety measures we need to put in place to save lives going forward. I know that we have an election on 6 May, and we'll all be fighting to take the job that you have, and you will be fighting to retain that job, but it's important that members of the public understand exactly who occupies that chair, what they will do in commissioning such a public inquiry. From my point of view, I want to see a public inquiry as soon as possible make progress, and, rather than lose it in a wider UK public inquiry, have a Wales-specific public inquiry. Could you clarify your remarks so that we can understand exactly when you believe that a public inquiry should start, and that you agree that it should be a stand-alone Welsh public inquiry, looking at the measures that Welsh Government have control over, rather than be submerged in a wider UK inquiry?

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Ann Jones) took the Chair.

Well, Llywydd, I believe that an inquiry will be a necessary and important part of the way that we learn the lessons of the extraordinary 12 months that we have lived through. I did not say yesterday that I thought it should wait until coronavirus was over; I said I thought it should wait until we are all confident that coronavirus is in the rear-view mirror. So, we will still be dealing with coronavirus, and will be for some time to come, but when we are certain that we are moving out of it and we're not at risk of it re-emerging again, then there will be capacity in the system to do the thinking and the work of contributing to a public inquiry.

I don't agree with him about a Wales-only inquiry. I've lost count of the number of times he has urged on me a four-nation approach, but on this issue he appears to think it sensible to go it alone. A Wales-only inquiry would not be able to grapple with a long list of issues that will be fundamental to being able to draw the lessons from what has happened. It would not be able to look at issues of foreign travel and the importation of the virus into the United Kingdom, and yet the first cases we saw here in Wales were viruses that came from elsewhere in the world. It would not be able to deal with the decision making of COBRA and the way in which that has impacted on the course of the virus here in Wales. It would not be able to deal with the vaccination programme, because the vaccination programme relies heavily on the successful work of the UK Government in securing supplies of the vaccine. It wouldn't be able to deal with the testing programme, because again, for the testing programme, we rely on the lighthouse labs for a good part of the testing programme here in Wales, and those labs and the decisions about them are made by the UK Government. Llywydd, I could go on. There is a very long list of things that are absolutely central to understanding the way in which coronavirus has impacted here in Wales.

That will, absolutely properly, look at the decision making of the Welsh Government as well, but trying to do it in isolation from the decisions that have been made across the United Kingdom and by other Governments as well as decisions that have been made jointly, it wouldn't even begin to tell the picture of what has happened in the last 12 months, it would not be worth it as an endeavour. On this matter, I agree with the advice he normally gives me, that a UK-wide inquiry, in which the decision making of all layers of Government will be fundamental, that is the way to learn the lessons, in a way that is right, proper and effective. And that's something that I'm very committed to making sure happens.