Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:55 pm on 26 May 2021.
Llywydd, I'll deal with the very first part of the Member's question first. So, one of the very first decisions I made on resuming this job after the election was to release £66 million from that £200 million to go directly to businesses in Wales. By the end of the second day of that fund being open, nearly 2,000 applications had been received for £10.1 million, and, by today, awards have already been offered to the first of those businesses to apply, and that money will be with them by the start of next week. That money is designed to support those businesses through the month of May and through the month of June as well, at which point we will be able to, through discussions with the sectors, agree how some of the remaining money can then best be deployed. So, I just want to be clear with Members that no business is left unable to claim support. Businesses are already claiming support from the £66 million. Decisions to award funding have already been made, and the money is on its way to them.
It is a very important point that the Member raises about hospitality and the events sector, and I wish I could give them a more definite answer than I'm able to. We've moved to level 2 restrictions. The Cabinet will be considering, this week and next, whether or not it is sufficiently safe in Wales to move to level 1 restrictions, and that would further liberalise the ability of the hospitality and events sectors to get back to business. Of course, that is what we want to happen. We want to be in a sufficiently strong position that those sectors can reopen safely and be able to attract customers back to them. I know, in the next question, Llywydd, we'll be talking about pilot events that we are holding to learn lessons how that can best be done. But the context within which we are making those decisions is a genuinely challenging one.
The India variant of coronavirus is already in Wales, as the leader of the opposition acknowledged. Across our border, it is now in community spread. It is doubling every five to seven days in those communities. We know it is more transmissible. We know that the vaccine is less effective in dealing with it. The Royal Bolton Hospital yesterday issued an appeal from its chief executive for patients not to attend there, because of the pressure that hospital is under because of the coronavirus outbreak in that city: eight people in critical care in that one hospital in England—more than twice the number of people in critical care in the whole of Wales. We've just got to go on very carefully, looking at that context, seeing any impact that there may be in Wales, and then make decisions that are as helpful to the sector as we can be without doing what the sector itself has asked us all along: not to find ourselves in a position where, having opened up the sector, we're in a position of having to close it down again. It is, as the leader of the opposition said, a very finely balanced set of judgments, and we'll continue to make those judgments over the next week as further data comes in from what is happening across our border and the numbers we now see here in Wales.