3. Business Statement and Announcement

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:58 pm on 29 June 2021.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 2:58, 29 June 2021

Trefnydd, I very much welcome yesterday's announcement that, if you've been vaccinated in Wales, you can download a Welsh COVID pass online to demonstrate to whoever needs to know that you are protected by two jabs. And this seems to me a really good example of how we use artificial intelligence and online data to ensure that we're not tying up the resources of health professionals on something that can be done electronically. So, that's an excellent thing. I wondered if we could have a statement from the health Minister about the arrangements for vaccination certificates for those who've had one jab in Wales and another in England. There are many, many of my constituents who, for example, study in Cardiff but reside in England or elsewhere, and we need to ensure that they're not put off having the vaccination at the quickest possible time without having the complication of not being able to demonstrate they've had that. So, that would be great, if we could have that statement—a written statement would be fine. 

Secondly, the pandemic hasn't gone away, and there continue to be many restrictions on freedom of movement. I'm not talking about the Home Office aversion to asylum seekers, but about the public health emergency that requires us to control the freedom of movement from one country to another. But language schools in my constituency have been hugely impacted, obviously, by the inability of foreign students to come and study English here. They simply have no customers whatsoever, which they had before, so I wondered if we could ask the economy Minister to consider that, instead of handing out grants to an organisation that's simply unable to operate under the normal model of business, they could be commissioned to deliver services to people in this country who need English-for-speakers-of-other-languages classes—for example, people who have recently been given refugee status—so that they can become much more economically effective members of our community. Similarly, I think you could have the same analogy for, say, musicians, for whom it simply isn't viable financially to run concerts, because of the restrictions on numbers in any given place, but who obviously have wonderful skills that we could be commissioning them to deliver services in schools or in care homes or elsewhere.