Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:47 pm on 21 September 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:47, 21 September 2021

By all means, Llywydd. I'm happy to set out for Members the process by which assistance from the armed forces can be secured. It's called the MACA process—military aid to the civil authorities—and the process works in this way: it relies on a request from, in this case, the local health board, which sets out the nature of the help that it would need—I beg your pardon, in this case, from the Welsh Ambulance Service NHS Trust—that sets out the nature of the help it would need, the jobs that they think armed forces personnel could assist with, the number of people they think they would need. That application comes, first of all, to the Welsh Government. That request has now been received. The Welsh Government has a role either to endorse or to send back that request for further work.

Through the whole of the pandemic, every time we have received a request of that sort from the health service, we have always endorsed it. We then have to send it on, because the decision rests with the Ministry of Defence as to whether or not to approve that application. Over the course of the pandemic, most applications have been approved, but not all. So, it's not a rubber-stamping exercise; the Ministry of Defence look at it and they decide whether or not they are able to help. And that will be the stage we will be at next, making sure that we make the best possible application to the Ministry of Defence, and hoping that they will be able to offer us the help that they have offered us in very large measure during the course of the pandemic.