3. Will the First Minister make a statement on community safety in Alyn and Deeside? OQ56487

I thank Jack Sargeant, Llywydd, for that question. On Thursday last, 18 March, I chaired the latest meeting of the policing partnership board for Wales. The board reviewed the experience of communities during the pandemic, and recommitted the Welsh Government and the police to act together to support strong, safe communities across our nation, including the Member's constituency.

Thank you for that answer, First Minister. You will know that the Tories came to Alyn and Deeside and they promised 62 new police officers, specifically in Deeside. They have delivered none, specifically in Deeside. Welsh Labour have funded police community support officers across Alyn and Deeside and the Welsh Tories have now committed to cutting them as well. First Minister, my community has been hit hard by the Tory police cuts. Will you commit to funding even more PCSOs to work with communities to make our streets safer, and will you continue to step in and act where the Prime Minister's failed to do so?

Llywydd, I thank Jack Sargeant for those very important points, and he's right: the record of the Conservative Party for a decade is of defunding the police across the United Kingdom. Between 2010 and 2018—all years in which the Conservative Party ran the UK Government—police numbers in Wales and England dropped by a staggering 21,732 officers. That's nearly 500 fewer police on the streets here in Wales because of the deliberate decisions of the Conservative Government. And even if all their current plans were to succeed—as Jack Sargeant has said, not a single one of the 62 officers they promised in Alyn and Deeside have yet materialised—even if they were to succeed in full, those numbers would not recover to where policing numbers were before the long Tory years of cutting police budgets and police numbers. I'm very proud of the fact that since 2011, successive Welsh Governments have funded 500 police and community support officers, and if this Government is returned in May, not only will those 500 officers remain in place, but we'll add to it with another 100 officers, so that there are more people on the beat, on the streets, in every part of Wales.

Community safety in Flintshire and across north Wales requires joined-up multi-agency working with communities themselves and the role of North Wales Police is central to this. With community safety being a devolved matter, Welsh Conservatives would continue to support and fund police community support officer numbers in Wales, working alongside the UK Conservative Government programme to recruit an additional 20,000 police officers in England and Wales by March 2023. How do you therefore propose to ensure partnership working between the Welsh and UK Governments on this agenda, where the actual uplift in additional police officers in England and Wales has already reached 6,620 by 31 December 2020, including 302 extra officers in Wales, and 62 in north Wales, with further increases to follow in the next two years, recognising that community safety in north Wales is entirely dependent upon north Wales's established integrated working with their adjacent partner police forces in north-west England?

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.