Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:52 pm on 18 January 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:52, 18 January 2022

Well, I have absolutely nothing to apologise for, Llywydd. The Conservative Party in Wales has a great deal to apologise for in the way that it has time after time after time sought to deny people in Wales and businesses in Wales the protections that are needed from a global pandemic. We put in measures that were designed to make sure that lives were saved in Wales and that businesses could go on trading, and there's absolutely nothing to apologise for in doing that because those measures were necessary and those measures have been effective. Because of the help that is available from the Welsh Government, a pub that lost £16,000 in Wales, if it can establish that that is indeed the case, could recoup all of that from the help that we have now put on the table through the non-domestic rates element and through the economic resilience fund. In England, £4,000 is the maximum that any such business would receive. And, no, I'm not going to offer a blank cheque in saying that we would go beyond that. There's public money at stake here. A pub that can show that it lost £16,000 in Wales, the potential is there for it to receive all of that back from the Welsh Government. I don't think it would be a sensible or a justifiable course of action to say that the public purse would go beyond the losses that a business had sustained.