Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:10 pm on 7 December 2021.
I thank Jayne Bryant for that and for both of the two practical examples that she mentioned. I said that Jack Sargeant had taken me to see the impact of bank closures in Buckley; it was the Member for Newport West who took me to see Sero Zero Waste, the community shop at Tredegar House, and the two fantastic young women who had taken the risk of setting it all up and who have made such a success of it.
As far as RE:MAKE Newport is concerned, then the Member will know, I'm sure, that it is funded by the Welsh Government's landfill disposals tax communities scheme, a scheme designed particularly here in Wales when that piece of fiscal responsibility was transferred to us and endorsed as the legislation went through the Senedd. Repair cafes are a phenomenon of Wales—we have over 60 of them already—but something that I think RE:MAKE Newport offers is a step further again. Because, in a way that I'm familiar with from some other examples, you can take in household items that need to be repaired, and if you don't need them yourself, you are able to contribute them to a lending library where people who may not have easy access to quickly repaired items can go and borrow them for their own use.
We look around the Chamber here and we generally think how lucky all of us are that, if something small goes wrong at home—if the kettle breaks down, if the toaster needs repairing—we don't have to think about where we're going to find the money to be able to replace that item. But we know in Wales there is an enormous percentage of households who have no savings at all to fall back on and where even minor domestic difficulties loom very large over that household's ability to be able to manage through the week ahead. Those lending libraries of repaired items are a real lifeline in those communities, and it's great to see RE:MAKE Newport being part of that latest step in that development.