7. The Health Protection (Coronavirus Restrictions) (No. 5) (Wales) (Amendment) (No. 5) Regulations 2021

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:01 pm on 23 March 2021.

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Photo of Mark Reckless Mark Reckless Conservative 6:01, 23 March 2021

I made some general comments earlier, but on the specifics of the regulations, I welcome broadly things that are moving in a liberalising direction. I do struggle a little understanding why, trying to connect the pace of opening to the pace at which the data is improving. It strikes me that data has been improving beyond our best expectations in recent weeks, but that doesn't seem to feed through to an accelerated pace of opening. We had the stage 4 restrictions and the overall levels of prevalence and the various tests set seem to be much more akin to level 2, but the regulations don't seem to move at a similar pace to allow that opening up. I know there's been a lot of mention of the Kent variant, but surely that's taken into account in the statistics that we are now seeing. 

I regret—. We have some changes. I haven't taken advantage of the Wales-only haircuts myself yet, but I know some people value that, and that's one area where we're ahead of England. The areas we seem to be behind: I'm not clear what's happening on the reopening of gyms and indoor sport, or why that has to be done more slowly. I think just those small differences—. Again, the Minister makes a great attack on someone from the centre-right suggesting politicians from the centre-left were keener on control and rules and regulations. He took great umbrage at that. I just again make the point that, for those of us who are unionists and who would prefer these decisions to be taken by UK Government rather than Welsh Government, having small differences at every stage (a) complicates the communication, but (b) I think gives challenges for compliance that would be less if Welsh Government tried harder to stay clearer to a four-nations approach in more areas and closer to what the UK Government was doing.

My greatest concern about these regulations, or at least how they're being implemented on the ground, is schools. We were told that getting kids back to school was the most important thing, yet this is the third week that all kids have been back in England, yet we still see huge numbers of children not going to school, at least physically, and I would question how effective some of the online teaching is in comparison, in Wales. And we're told that people can check in, but I speak to constituents' kids who have got one day where they check in, in year 7, 8 or 9, in the run-up to Easter, and I'd question whether that's satisfactory and couldn't we be doing more on that front. We intend to abstain on these regulations. Thank you.