Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:56 pm on 16 November 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:56, 16 November 2021

I want to thank the leader of Plaid Cymru for that question. I think the point he made is worth repeating, Llywydd, isn't it, that the OBR, the Government's own advisers, in the run-up to the budget two weeks ago, concluded that the impact of Brexit in shrinking the UK economy would be twice the size of the global pandemic. And while the global pandemic is something from which we can recover, the Brexit impact is baked in to the agreement that the Prime Minister reached—an agreement without, as we would have wished to see, an economic relationship with the European Union with access to the single market, a customs union, to support it. And the result is that people in Wales will be permanently—permanently—poorer as a result of the deal that the Prime Minister struck. And we see it, as the leader of Plaid Cymru said, across the range of the Welsh economy. We see it in the care home sector, where we're no longer able to recruit people who did such valuable work here in Wales. We see it in the HGV driver shortage, which is a UK-wide phenomenon and where the paltry measures that the UK Government introduced are having a negligible effect on that set of difficulties. We have a manufacturing industry in Wales unable to operate at full strength because of supply chain bottlenecks, because trade no longer flows without barriers with our nearest and most important neighbours.

Llywydd, we approach it as a Welsh Government in two specific ways. There are the particular problems that are caused at Welsh ports, in Holyhead and in Pembrokeshire, with trade depressed and new difficulties in its path. And there we try to persuade the UK Government to do the things that would allow the land bridge, the most effective way of transporting goods between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and the UK and on to Europe, to make that function again as it did before their deal was struck. And then, more widely, we work with others, we work with our colleagues in Scotland and in Northern Ireland, to try to put pressure on the UK Government to approach relationships with our most important trading partners on the basis of mutual respect, on the basis that, if there are difficulties in agreements that need to be sorted out, you come around the table, you see the position from the other person's point of view as well as your own, and then you reach a formula that brings about improvement. What you don't do is to approach it as this UK Government does, where everything is an argument, where everything is a chance to fall out, where everything, as it seems to me, is a chance to make a difficult situation even worse.