Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:03 pm on 23 March 2021.
Llywydd, is the Member seriously asking us to congratulate his party because they've managed to restore one quarter of the cuts in police numbers that they inflicted on Wales and England over the last decade? Is that a serious proposition that he's putting to us this afternoon? When I talk to people who are worried about community safety, they don't talk to me about joined-up agency working. What they ask is, 'Why aren't there more people here, on the beat, doing the job we want them to do?' And the answer is: because his Government took away nearly 22,000 of those people, and it was the Welsh Government that stepped in to restore those 500 police and community support officers that otherwise we would have done without. It's no point at all the Conservative Party in Wales pretending that their party did anything other than to defund the police year after year after year, and it was this Government that stepped in to help keep people safe.