Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 1:44 pm on 11 May 2022.
Thank you, James. Clearly, the online safety and harms Bill is an important vehicle to try and tackle some of the problems that you've alluded to, which I know you've raised before in this Chamber. You are right in that digital is not devolved to us, but there are discussions that take place between officials in Welsh Government and officials in Westminster, and I'm in particular looking at the opportunities that we can build on that Bill to enhance our work around things like suicide prevention. I think it's also important to recognise that the Welsh Government has invested considerable resources in ensuring that young people can access support in a way that's suitable for them—for instance, our young person's mental health toolkit, which has recently been revised, which is enabling young people to access support in the way that suits them, doing it online. We're also looking at bystander interventions with things like bullying, and all our responses are geared towards making sure that we are supporting young people where they need to be supported, and, of course, our new curriculum has a really important role to play in that. We've got a health and well-being area of learning in the curriculum that is going to be embedded across the whole curriculum, alongside the work that we're doing to have relationships and sexuality education for children and young people, and I think it's really important that those issues are tackled as a part of that across the whole curriculum, and hopefully from a younger age as well. But, as you say, it's not devolved, what's going on in social media, but we all have a role to play in supporting young people and making sure that they can access the support, so that they know that the things that they see on social media are not real things.