5. Will the First Minister make a statement on the Welsh Government's approach to recovery from COVID-19 in Mid and West Wales? OQ57774

Llywydd, I thank Joyce Watson for that. Our transition plan, published on 4 March, continues our well-established approach to the pandemic, informed by the best advice, focused on living safely with COVID-19 and prepared for new threats that the virus could yet pose.

First Minister, the gradual, science-led response of the Welsh Government to the pandemic has been supported by the majority of people in Wales. How confident are you of the ability of Wales to continue to take that approach, and what assessment have you made of the impact UK Government actions may have on that?

Llywydd, I thank Joyce Watson for that important question. We are on track, we believe, to move beyond alert level 0 on 28 March. And on Friday of last week, we published our transition plan, which is all about living safely with the virus. We are moving from the emergency to the endemic state of dealing with the pandemic, and, while we are living safely with the virus, we will rely on good advice, properly informed, as the Member said, by the best clinical and scientific advice available to us. We will have to rely on the continued responsibility of individual citizens here in Wales, and then that sense of responsibility will be underpinned by actions that only Governments can take. And that is where the actions of the UK Government are concerning to us. The abrupt, cliff-edge end to testing in England has, in the perverse way of the system, driven Barnett consequentials into Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that constrain our ability to make different choices of a public health nature, and really that cannot be acceptable.

We have two major concerns at the way in which the UK Government is rushing to remove the protections that have been available to citizens over the last two years. First of all, we have to have a sufficient capacity of surveillance so that we are able to spot whether there are new variants emerging here in Wales, new variants being imported from other parts of the world, or simply local outbreaks, where you need to have a more intensive public health response. Without adequate testing, having an adequate surveillance system becomes more difficult.

And secondly, I have a real concern about the way in which it will be possible in future to rebuild a system should we face an unexpected surprise. The UK Government has decided unilaterally to close the Imperial Park 5 laboratory in Newport at the end of this month. Wales will be the only part of the United Kingdom, or of Great Britain at least, without a testing laboratory of that sort available to us. I ask UK Ministers repeatedly what would happen in the autumn if we were to see a different variant emerge and a need for a new, stepped-up level of testing to be available to deal with it, and so far, Llywydd, I can tell you that there is no answer to that at all. Once you have dismantled a sophisticated laboratory of the sort we've had in Newport, when you take that equipment away, when you say to the people who have served us so well over the last two years that we're going to dispense with their services in a few short weeks, do we really expect that they will simply re-emerge when we need them again in an emergency? These are short-sighted actions, they are driven by the Treasury, in my view, not by the department of health in London, and I hope that we will not all have to live to regret them.