Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 28 June 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:48, 28 June 2022

I thank Andrew Davies for that question, Llywydd, and he's right to point to the continuing horrors of events in Ukraine. The Welsh Government has had to suspend temporarily our supersponsorship platform because of the outstanding success that the platform has been. We have had a far larger take-up of the potential offer to come to Wales, and we have already had far more people arrive in Wales than the 1,000 that we said originally that we would accommodate. The vast bulk of those people are in our welcome centres, and those welcome centres I think offer an outstanding service. The Minister for Social Justice and I were in Llangrannog on Monday of last week where there are 300 people from Ukraine—200 adults and 100 children—receiving the most amazing welcome and the most appreciated opportunity to regroup, to feel, as they said to me, a sense of healing having arrived from a place of such difficulties to a place where they now felt safe and looked after.

The real focus of our efforts over the coming weeks has to be on moving people beyond the welcome centres and into the homes of those many families in Wales who continue to be willing to offer a place in their homes so that people can continue to rebuild their lives. That is not happening as quickly as we need it to happen. There are reasons for that, because offers of help have to be checked, police checks have to be carried out, social services departments have to visit and so on, and that isn’t a process that you can hurry if you’re going to get the matches between the people who are in the welcome centre and the people offering accommodation right, so that we don’t see the level of breakdown in those arrangements that is being reported in some other parts of the country. That will be our focus over the coming weeks. As soon as we have a balance between people being able to leave the welcome centres and go to families and the number of people wishing to come to Wales, then we’ll be in a position to reopen the supersponsorship route.