00:00for the comments made about our emergency services and the stellar work they did over
00:04the weekend to keep people safe, and also to those people working in Welsh Water and
00:09National Grid who have done their bit as well, trying to restore services for people.
00:12Most of my friends are actually working at National Grid, so it would be remiss if I
00:15didn't mention them.
00:16I know a lot of them were out on the Friday and the Saturday night, but got to stand down
00:20because it was too dangerous for them actually to be out in the weather.
00:24Cabinet Secretary, what I want to touch on, as you said in your statement, these weather
00:27events are becoming more and more frequent, and that means we need to make sure that our
00:31regulator, Natural Resources Wales, is operationally effective when it comes to dealing with these
00:37issues.
00:38The Cabinet Secretary for Finance today allocated more money to your portfolio.
00:43Natural Resources Wales had a cut in the previous Welsh Government budget, so I'm interested
00:46to hear from you today how much extra money are you going to allocate to Natural Resources
00:51Wales, because if we're going to have more of these flooding events and storm events
00:55coming forward, we need to make sure that they've got all the tools at their disposals
00:59and the finance available, so they can step up to the plate when we need them to.
01:02Alun Ferguson AM James, thank you very much for that, and,
01:05again, I echo your support for the work of all those who responded to these.
01:10In the electricity utilities, but also in the water utilities as well, because one of
01:15the knock-on effects has been that we have had scores of water treatment works and others
01:19that have been out of action.
01:22Emergency generators have been provided in that mutual aid support.
01:25There was already planning for this sort of eventuality.
01:28This did not catch us cold, but we still get impacted by it, and credit to them, because
01:33they were out there doing that in the height of what was going on.
01:38In my house, we had a window taken out with the strength of the storm.
01:41While I was trying to batten down my window, they were up in pylons and out in fields trying
01:46to load up generators to keep water treatment works going.
01:50It's quite incredible and quite heroic there.
01:53NRW also played their part, I have to say.
01:55NRW have been through a series of storm incidents now, and they have been up to the mark.
02:00They've been out there with all the other agencies doing well.
02:03We've put money into NRW to help them do this as well.
02:06I can't give the detail of how we will use the additional money that we've actually put
02:12forward today, but I will be appearing as Penumbra in front of committees to go through
02:16that sort of detail.
02:17But what I can say is, in terms of flood resilience, we're already at record level.
02:21We've been doing that for a couple of years.
02:23We put specifically money into NRW to help them with their own flood responsibility as
02:30well, as well as the money that we put into local authorities and others.
02:34So, we're very focused on this because we really know that this is going to be far from
02:39the last.
02:40We have to deal with these on a fairly regular basis now, and in which case there's community
02:45resilience levels, and then there's the big agencies and public authorities as well, making
02:52sure that they've got full capacity as well.
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