£40m package to help Welsh economy recover
THE Welsh Government will today announce a £40m jobs and skills package to help the Welsh economy recover from the impact of coronavirus.
It will reveal more support for apprenticeships, together with traineeships, redundancy assistance, retraining programmes and careers advice.
There will also be a pledge to help anyone over 16 in Wales to access advice and support to find work, pursue self-employment or find a place in education or training.
The additional funding follows an announcement last week by Education Minister Kirsty Williams of a £50m investment in skills and learning for higher and further education.
Further details will be announced this afternoon.
Meanwhile, the Balearic and Canary Islands have been added to Spain on a list of areas where all non-essential travel should be avoided, the UK Government has said, potentially wrecking the summer holiday plans of tens of thousands.
MORE people think the Covid-19 crisis has been handled badly than well in the UK, with the UK Government receiving most of the blame, a new poll has found.
The King’s College London and Ipsos Mori study also found the public is sceptical about the UK Government’s safety claims when it comes to reopening the economy after the lockdown.
The figures came as Wales recorded no new deaths with coronavirus for the 12th time this month.
Of the 2,237 UK adults aged 16-75 who were polled, 70% blamed the UK Government as a whole for the mismanagement of the pandemic, with 65% blaming the Prime Minister.
Some 55% of respondents blamed “the public who failed to follow guidance”, while the Conservative Party was blamed by 41%.
According to the poll, the public looks more favourably on how the devolved administrations have dealt with the pandemic, with just 5% of those asked in Wales blaming the Welsh Government, 11% in Scotland blaming the Scottish Government and 17% in Northern Ireland blaming the Northern Ireland Assembly.
The survey also showed that 52% of the public does not trust the UK Government’s advice on when it is safe to start to return to work, school or leisure activities, compared with 45% who do.
By 42% to 36%, the public is more likely to think the pandemic has been handled badly than well.
There is a split along party lines when it comes to the UK Government’s role, with 2019 Labour voters (60%) three times more likely than 2019 Conservative voters (21%) to say it has been mismanaged.
There was a note of caution with the Welsh findings as while more than 2,000 people were questioned overall, the number of respondents from Wales – 102 – represents a relatively small sample size.
Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, said Boris Johnson and his Government “are the focus of blame”.
He added: “People see the UK public as a key reason it’s gone well – and a key reason it’s gone badly, showing how varied an image we have of how different people have followed the guidelines, or not.”
In terms of who handled the crisis well in the UK, the NHS is the standout body with 72% believing the health service handed it well.
Only 30% felt that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had handled it well compared to 42% who credited the Welsh Government.
Kelly Beaver, managing director of public affairs at Ipsos Mori, said party loyalty seemed to play a role in how people think the Government has performed.
She added: “It’s very much back to
politics as usual when it comes to how Britons feel Covid-19 has been handled, with those who voted Labour in 2019 far likelier to say that the Government or the Conservative Party are at fault than those who voted Conservative in 2019.”
In a separate development, Public Health Wales (PHW) yesterday announced the total number of deaths with lab-confirmed Covid-19 in Wales since the outbreak began remains at 1,549.
There have now been no new deaths reported by the NHS trust on 12 occasions in July (July 6, 10, 12, 13 and 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25 and 27).
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean no-one died with the virus on those specific dates as it can take several days for a death to be logged officially.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) the true death toll in Wales, where the virus was mentioned on a death certificate, was already 2,484 by July 10.
Meanwhile PHW said the number of lab-confirmed positive cases of coronavirus in Wales had increased by 45 to bring the total to 17,170.
Wrexham recorded by far the most positive cases with 12, followed by Flintshire with eight, Newport with four and Rhondda Cynon Taf and Swansea both with three.
Denbighshire, Gwynedd, Cardiff, Vale of Glamorgan and Powys all had two, while Torfaen, Anglesey, Conwy and Neath Port Talbot had one. All the other local authorities had no new cases.
Despite testing capacity standing at 15,000 each day in Wales, around half (7,546) was used on Sunday.
Meanwhile, latest data shows Wales has a lower “R number” for coronavirus – which gives an indication of the rate of infection – than England.
England currently has an R number of 0.8-1.0 with the virus falling by between 4% and 0% a day according to the UK Government’s pandemic modelling body SPI(M).
The R number denotes the number of people each person with Covid-19 is infecting with the virus.
If that number goes above one and remains there, the number of people becoming infected with the virus will grow exponentially, leading to tens of thousands of additional deaths across the UK.
As long as the R number remains below one, the number of people infected with the virus will continue to fall.
In Wales the R number has been falling. The most recent estimate of the reproduction number from SPI(M) is between 0.6 and 0.8 with a central estimate of 0.7. This is lower than in any region of England, where the figure is between 0.8 and 1.0 in London, eastern England, the north-east and Yorkshire, and the south-east, and between 0.7 and 1.0 in the Midlands, the north-west and south-west.
In Scotland the R rate was between 0.6 and 0.9 on July 22 whereas in Northern Ireland it was between 0.5 and 0.9.
At the start of the crisis the R rate was as high as two and there were many cases – this made the R rate a very important and useful measurement.
However, there have now been up to eight consecutive weeks of the R rate in Wales being below one with infections believed to be declining by up to 3% a day.
As there are fewer and fewer cases the R value becomes less useful because, with a small sample size, even one or two new cases can wildly skew the number.
The Welsh Government is therefore not using the R rate as much now and instead has a list of indicators it is looking at to decide if Wales needs to tighten up lockdown regulations again.
These indicators are designed to spot spikes before we need to go back into a full lockdown.