Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 19 October 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:51, 19 October 2021

Well, for the many reasons that I've previously explained, Llywydd. I had an opportunity yesterday to meet with the Prime Minister. It was a wide-ranging meeting, but I had two issues in particular that I wanted to make sure I put directly to the Prime Minister in that meeting. One was the issue of coal-tip safety and its importance here in Wales, and the other was to follow up the meeting that I had held with bereaved families here in Wales and to put some of the points that they put to me to the Prime Minister. And what I put to the Prime Minister was that, for Wales to be part of the UK inquiry that he has proposed and in the way that he has asked us to be involved, I needed to be able to provide assurances to others that Wales would not be, in the term that is sometimes used, a footnote in a UK inquiry, that the inquiry would provide a specific focus on the Welsh experience, that it would go about its inquiries in a way that provided ample opportunity for people in Wales to be directly involved in it, and that, when it came to reporting, there would be material in the report that was directly focused on the way in which decisions had been made here in Wales. The Prime Minister gave positive replies to all of that, recognising the points that were made and reaffirming his wish that the Welsh dimension, as he put it, of the coronavirus experience, would be properly investigated and then reported within the wider context, without which you cannot make proper sense of what happened in Wales or provide the answers that people, quite rightly, will look to the inquiry to provide.