Questions now from the party leaders. First, the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, Andrew R.T. Davies.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. May I wish you and the First Minister and fellow Members a very happy new year and good health to everyone as well.

First Minister, over the Christmas period, we saw the farcical scenes at Caerphilly rugby club where only 50 people were allowed to watch the game outside, whereas several hundred congregated indoors to watch it on tv. Your latest restrictions have sadly also made activities such as parkruns practically impossible to organise. To many people, even those who have historically supported your decisions and restrictions, this doesn't seem to make sense and certainly doesn't follow the science that we've seen to date. Will you listen to these legitimate concerns, First Minister, and make the necessary changes at this week's review?

Well, I reciprocate the good wishes from the leader of the opposition, of course, as we go into the new year, but I don't agree with quite a lot of what he just said. All the actions that the Welsh Government takes are those recommended to us and endorsed by our clinical and scientific advisers. This is a Government that follows the science, does not spend its time trying to pressurise scientists into giving us advice that will be politically convenient for us. Nor do I agree with him that it is practically impossible to do some of the things he said; I see many, many people running in the park in organised groups within the current level of protections. Fifty people can get together with 50 other people helping to organise themselves into such activity, and many, many people are taking advantage of that. We will keep the protections under review. As soon as we get advice that it is safe to do so, then of course we will want to begin to reverse the journey we've had to be on while Wales is in the teeth of the omicron storm. And let me be clear, Llywydd: that is where we are. We are still facing the enormous pressures and impacts of coronavirus in the way that the past two questions have so amply demonstrated.

I'm disappointed, First Minister, to see your doubling down on this, particularly when you seemed to be an outlier on this particular issue. Parkrun is going ahead right across the United Kingdom. In England, there are no restrictions on crowd numbers, in Northern Ireland, caps on crowds are at 50 per cent capacity or 5,000 people, whilst changes seem to be afoot in Scotland. Yesterday, the Scottish national clinical director said that crowd limits seem to have had little difference to their case numbers. With the six nations around the corner, which is an important part of the business model for many Welsh businesses, particularly the Welsh Rugby Union, it is vital you provide them with a clear sense of direction of travel. Given that you are in receipt of the latest modelling and advice, can you confirm, or at the very least give an indication, as to when fans will be able to return to Welsh stadiums?

Well, of course, the leader of the opposition is right that we have the latest modelling. It shows that the peak of the omicron wave of coronavirus is yet to be reached in Wales, that we may be 10 days away from the peak, and numbers could continue to climb very rapidly. Now, as I've said a number of times, in a small piece of good news, the same modelling shows numbers then beginning to decline relatively rapidly as well.

Once we are in a position of knowing that Wales has passed the peak, that the impact that it is having on our public services, on workers in the private sector, on the ability of our health service to deal with the growing numbers of people in a hospital bed because of coronavirus, then we will want, as quickly but as safely as possible, to begin to relax some of the protections that have been necessary while the omicron wave was still coming at us, but we're not at that point. We're not at that point today. Now, we will review the data, as we do every day and every week, and next week will be the end of a three-week review period. If we are very fortunate, and it's a very big 'if', and we find that we have passed that peak and we are on a reliable reduction in impact of coronavirus upon us, then we will look to see what we can do, as I say, to relax some of the protections that we've had to put in place. But we will not do it—[Interruption.] We will not do it until we are confident that the scientific and medical advice to us is that it is safe to move in that direction.

First Minister, restrictions were imposed in Wales based on the modelling and therefore you should be basing that further removal on the modelling. You have no excuses not to provide such a plan, First Minister. It is vital for businesses that are feeling the pain with limits on hospitality and mental health taking a kicking with sports being scaled back that a plan out of these restrictions is brought forward by your Government. Can you therefore confirm today that you will listen to these calls and provide a road map out of the restrictions at your review on Friday?

Well, we will do exactly what the leader of the Conservative Party said we should do at the start of that final question—we will follow the modelling. As I've said to him, the modelling currently shows that we are not yet at the peak of coronavirus in Wales. Now, nobody, I think, in a responsible position would argue that we should be lessening the levels of protection available here in Wales while the number of people suffering from the omicron wave is going up, not coming down. Once we are in a position where we are confident that we are past the peak and that the numbers are indeed falling, that will be the point at which we are able to set out, as of course we would want to do, a plan for reducing some of the protections that are currently in place, because then the numbers in Wales will be improving, not worsening. The model tells us that we're likely to see them worsening over the next week, and in those circumstances, it simply would not be responsible to think that this is the moment at which you would begin to remove the protections that are helping to save people from this virus, keep more people in work, lessen the pressures on the NHS. Those are the reasons we take actions here in Wales, and we will not be diverted from doing so.

Questions now from the leader of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price.

First Minister, surging debt and the rapid and cumulative rise in the cost of living may soon overtake COVID as the biggest crisis we face over the coming year, plunging us ever more into poverty and mental ill health. Many of the key levers, of course, remain at Westminster, but we've learnt even today, haven't we, to place little faith in a Prime Minister who organises garden parties in the midst of a pandemic? When the global financial crisis hit, the Welsh Government then convened an emergency economic summit to pool ideas on what we in Wales could do independently ourselves to respond. Would you agree, First Minister, to consider convening a Welsh social summit to help devise an urgent cross-Government response to the cost-of-living crisis facing people and families in 2022?

Llywydd, I agree with the point that Adam Price started with. The Resolution Foundation, in a very detailed analysis published only a few days ago, said that April will mark a cost-of-living catastrophe for many, many families across the United Kingdom, with bills of over £1,000 coming their way just from the fuel price rises and the changes to national insurance contributions, and that doesn't take account of all the other pressures that we know are already there in family budgets, with real wages stagnant or reducing. And in that sense I think that Adam Price is quite right—the cost-of-living crisis is going to dominate the lives of many, many families across Wales. And for many families it has begun already, Llywydd, with those thousands of families faced with a cut of £20 a week in the reduction in universal credit—a genuinely cruel decision made by a Government that knew what the impact of that decision would be in the lives of the poorest families.

Now, across the Welsh Government, we are already taking action, whether that is the £51 million household support fund, which will offer help with fuel bills to families in Wales this winter; with our commitment to the council tax reduction scheme, 60 per cent of households in Wales get help through the council tax reduction scheme; through the millions of pounds in addition that we have put into the discretionary assistance fund; and through the actions that we are taking through our single advice fund to make sure that people in Wales have the help they need when they claim the things to which they are entitled—£17.5 million in additional benefits secured in the first six months of this financial year through the single advice fund and 35 new benefit advisers recruited to help us with the campaign we are running to make sure that people in Wales get the help that is there.

Now, I'll think about the point the Member has made, of course, about whether bringing people around the table in advance of April to see what more could be done would help us with the actions the Welsh Government can take, but that is not because there is not already a very comprehensive set of actions that the Welsh Government has already put in hand.

Given the scale of the crisis, I don't think it's an exaggeration at all to call it a cost-of-living catastrophe, then I think it's an important question that we must all ask, even within the limits of the devolution settlement: what more could we do to help people at this terribly difficult time? And if I can give one example, First Minister, at the moment, social housing providers can introduce rent rises of up to 4.1 per cent. Welsh Government could lower the cap so that any rent rises, at the very least, would be no greater than inflation. You could decide not to match the rail fare increase of 3.8 per cent announced in England before Christmas. Increasing rail fares and rent by around 4 per cent, at a time when annual income in Wales, according to the latest figures, rose by just 0.4 per cent, I think is surely not something that neither you nor I would want to see.

I understand the points that Adam Price makes, Llywydd. He will know that housing associations rely on rental income to finance their development programmes, so if they are unable to obtain through rental income the amounts that they were anticipating, it will mean that they can build fewer houses for social rent in future. That's what the money gets used for. The case he makes for not increasing rent levels above the rate of inflation is a powerful one, but it's not a decision without its costs in other opportunities that really matter to those people who are waiting for decent social housing in Wales. The same will be true in relation to public transport, that, if you don't raise the money via the fare box, then you end up, as we have in Wales, paying well, well over £100 million into the rail service just to keep its head above water, and that would mean more money would have to be found from those sources, and that means that money isn't available to do other things. So, it is not that I’m disputing the case he makes—he makes it, as I said, persuasively—it is just to point out that these are not cost-free courses of action. They involve opportunity costs and our inability to do other things that themselves could directly help exactly the sort of families that the leader of Plaid Cymru is focusing on today.

And I think it’s perfectly reasonable, First Minister, for you to raise the issue of the implications, in terms of revenue, for both Transport for Wales and for the housing sector. I suppose the point is whether, in these particular circumstances, given the nature of the cost-of-living emergency, there should be, in the short term, a greater emphasis put on that than other considerations.

I welcome, of course, the agreement last month in supporting our motion to begin talks with local authorities on debt bonfires for those with council tax arrears, and the additional winter fuel support scheme investment that you referred to. You could go further again, in agreeing with the Equality and Social Justice Committee recommendation to set out plans to accelerate the retrofitting of social housing and, indeed, as National Energy Action have urged, bring forward your target of abolishing fuel poverty from 2035 to 2028, and place that target on a statutory footing. It would be naïve to think that these actions in Wales would shame Boris Johnson into action in Westminster, as the man has no shame, but they would be a beacon of hope, as well as a source of practical help, to many people in Wales at a very dark and difficult time.

Well, Llywydd, the real risk here is not that we can bring the fuel poverty target forward, but that what is about to happen to families in April will plunge more families in Wales into fuel poverty rather than reduce that number. We know that people at the bottom end of the income spectrum spend a significantly higher proportion of their income on fuel bills than people who are better off, and more of those families are going to find themselves having to deal with the consequences of the failure of the Conservative Government in England. It was a Conservative Government that turned energy supply and fuel in the United Kingdom into a market solution, and we have seen an utter failure in that market, while the UK Government stands back and does absolutely nothing about it. Twenty-eight companies have gone to the wall and, on top of the £500 that families will have to pay because of the failure of the UK Government to get a grip on energy prices, they’re all going to be asked to pay £100 a year to deal with the consequences of those market failures as well. Try as the Welsh Government will to use all the things that we are able to mobilise to help families, the overriding responsibilities in this area lie with the UK Government—a UK Government that could reverse its universal credit cuts, a Government that could think of other ways in which those fuel bills can be more fairly shared across people, and could live up to its responsibilities instead of, as the Prime Minister does today and in so many areas of life, simply hiding and dodging on the things that ought to be on the top of his list of things to resolve.