Diolch. Well, this is another issue on which we are in agreement. As our Welsh Conservative manifesto stated in 2016, we would:

'Support the role of Police Community Support Officers, and work to realise their potential in tackling crime.'

And, as our 2021 manifesto states, we would:

'Increase funding for Police Community Support Officers each year, and expand the Safer Streets fund'.

Will you therefore now acknowledge that the claim made here by the First Minister on 16 March 2021 that a Welsh Conservative Government would scrap funding for police community support officers was at best ill-informed, and at worst deliberately misleading? 

In regard to the safer streets fund, in January, Sarah Atherton MP welcomed the news that the safer streets project in Wrexham was well under way, following the UK Government's awarding of £339,000 to North Wales Police for the project. The safer streets fund is a UK Government initiative that seeks to tackle crime, and the most recent round of funding has a specific focus on tackling violence and crime against women and girls. Last month, the UK Government announced that £150 million of funding will be made available in the fourth round of the safer streets fund, rolling over the next three financial years for police and crime commissioners and local authorities across Wales and England, as well as certain civil society organisations. That's on top of the £70 million already committed by the UK Government to the safer streets fund.

Given that the safer streets fund is clearly central to the work of PCSOs, how would you encourage and support bids for this from Wales and ensure that PCSOs are involved in these bids and in the delivery of the programmes that will hopefully result across our communities? And how will you ensure that this reflects cross-border reality where, for example, the north Wales regional organised crime unit told me that 95 per cent or more of crime in north Wales is local or operates on a cross-border east-west basis?

The safer streets fund builds on existing measures from the UK Government to keep our streets safe, including more than 11,000 police officers recruited across England and Wales as part of the UK Government drive to get 20,000 more police officers on the streets by 2023, meaning that by last October 147 police officers had been recruited in north Wales since September 2019, bringing the total number up to 1,654, virtually on a par with the highest head count on record, not 10 years previously, but 16 years previously, in 2005, and to 139,908 across Wales and England. 

More than four in 10 of the new police officer recruits since April 2020 are female. How, therefore, will you ensure that the PCSOs recruited in Wales are also representative of the communities they serve? And what discussions have you had with police forces in Wales about how the PCSOs are assigned and tasked to complement the work of warranted police officers in tackling crime and keeping communities safe?

Finally, why do you state that you funded police and community support officers despite not having responsibility for policing, when the Welsh Government has clear devolved responsibility for community safety, defined as people feeling safe in their local area, and PCSOs act

'As a key liaison point between local communities and policing'?