Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:57 pm on 17 November 2021.
Well, we have been engaging throughout the pandemic with the visitor economy forum and the hospitality stakeholder group, and some of the businesses that you've described will be represented by those groups. Obviously, things are continuing to be challenging for that sector. We've tried to make the COVID pass as simple as possible, but I do recognise that it is an additional job that we are requiring of businesses. But let's be really clear that the purpose of the COVID pass is to keep businesses open, and that's the best thing that we can do to support businesses of all types, just to keep them open. And that's one of the things that we've been seeking to do through the introduction of the COVID pass.
We're also looking through our lens to the future in terms of recovery for the sector, and we've been working on the plan, which was announced by my colleague the Deputy Minister very recently in terms of the tourism and hospitality recovery plan. And that, of course, focused on reconstruction and resilience for the sector. There have been some innovative new funding opportunities for the sector as well, such as the Brilliant Basics capital fund. That's recently been relaunched with a capital fund of £2.4 million to deliver some of those small-scale tourism infrastructure improvements across Wales. And we've also funded projects through our tourism attractor destination scheme. So, there are several sources of funding that we are able to deploy to support the sector.