Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:49 pm on 3 May 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:49, 3 May 2022

To be clear, the court has found nothing illegal as far as Wales is concerned, because Wales was not a participant in that High Court case. It took no evidence from Wales, it looked at no documents according to Wales, so, let's be clear for the record: when the Member says that the policy was illegal, what the court discovered was that it was illegal in England, where his party was in charge. It made no observations at all about what happened here in Wales.

I'm simply not going to pretend that in an answer on the floor of the Senedd we can explore an issue that took 75 pages of a High Court judgment to explore. And as I think the Member has just conceded, in order to make sense of what happened here in Wales you need to make sense of that wider UK context. We will respond, of course, to those issues, those very important issues that were at the heart of the High Court case, but we will do so in our evidence to the inquiry, which I am very confident will explore this issue along with a wide range of other issues that are there in its terms of reference when it begins its work later this year.