2. Business Statement and Announcement

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:59 pm on 15 June 2021.

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Photo of Alun Davies Alun Davies Labour 2:59, 15 June 2021

Minister, could we have an urgent statement from the Government on their analysis of the trade deal that seems to have been agreed last night between the United Kingdom and Australia? It appears from reports, and it certainly is the view of the two farming unions in Wales, that this is an opportunity for the UK Government to sacrifice agriculture in Wales, with the associated impact on rural communities, our language and culture, on the basis of short-term profits for Conservative donors in the City of London, and to sacrifice our rural communities on the basis of that prospectus, I think, is quite appalling. So, it would be useful if we could have a statement from the Government on the Government’s analysis of the potential impact of that trade deal.

Could I also seek to invite the Government and the Presiding Office to work together to ensure that we do have legislation to ensure that there are defibrillators available across the whole of Wales? Members will not be surprised that some of us found the scenes on Saturday night in Copenhagen particularly distressing. Certainly my memory of what happened to me was very similar to what happened to Christian Eriksen, and I think our hearts go out to him in what he has experienced, and his family, and we would all wish him a very good recovery.

But his life was saved, and other lives were saved, and my life was saved by passers by and people who had both the equipment and the skills required to save those lives. It doesn’t happen by accident, and Government can make that happen. Government has a power to do that. My life was saved because there was somebody close to me who could do cardiopulmonary resuscitation. We moved in a direction of ensuring that there is training available for CPR in the last Senedd, and the work that Kirsty Williams led on that is something for which we are all very grateful to her, but there are still not sufficient defibrillators. I know there are many charities and many people working extraordinarily hard on this, but unless there is a statutory framework ensuring there are defibrillators in every one of our communities—defibrillators that work and are maintained and where there is public access to them—there will still be too many lives lost that could have been saved.

I know there’s an opportunity for a Member’s legislative statement later this month, but what we need is the space and the time and the resources from both Government and the Presiding Office to ensure that this Parliament can act on the basis of what we know, what we understand, the appalling scenes we saw on Saturday night, and the experience of many of us, particularly those of us in this Chamber who have lost loved ones because we don’t have the facilities and the infrastructure in place.