 those businesses and those people who go out sensibly to enjoy themselves. We want that to happen. But it does bear down on a small minority of people who the later the night gets, the more the less likely they are to observe the rules and the more likely they are to cause difficulties for others. Firstly, thank you very much. Over to Adrian Masters of ITV Wales. Thank you, First Minister. If I could ask for some further clarity on that, I'm afraid it's gael i gyd, ond ar wnaeth am hyn o gwneud hynny. Mae'r prifeddech chi'n gynnwys o'r peth, oherwydd mae'r dyfodol yn i gyd yn y stdyn nhw. Felly, y'ch gweithiau ifymaid gael eitubol a rhai gyda gyda gwybod y fenywodau, ym pethau yma yn 10 o'n fwrdd o'r mlynedd ar cleif arnyn nhw? Fos gyd, â'r gweithio roi'n gynfeydd arulell. Mae'n gweithio, wrth gweithio, oherwydd, wrth gweithio ar gyfer y dyn nhw, Felly mae'r pubs rŵr o'r byf yn urchaynol. Mae gyd yn ystod i'r byd ac mae'r buf yn ystod i'n gynllun hynny lle oeddaeth yng Nghymru ngosidag'i peirio'r hwnnw, adeiladodd yn y ddevog fitnid. Felly yn y flwyddyn yng Nghymru mae'n meddwl yng nghymedeith ar rai hwnnw a'n 10 o'r clwg. Mae e'n ffordd â chyfnodd ac mae oedd mennyddio i'n cwrdd ac mae oeddaeth yn heb eu cofeithio, will be on their way home again. So, drinking up time in those old-fashioned terms. In that old-fashioned term, indeed. Another question of clarity. Is childcare, does that count as essential travel in your understanding? And are there any limits on the number of children that could be involved in either childcare or in social settings, for instance, a sleepover or parties? Childcare is an essential, is a reasonable reason for travelling. The number of children who can be involved at any childcare setting depends on the setting itself. There is no absolute number that I'm aware of. Different childcare settings have different numbers of rooms, different sort of space available to them, and a judgment has to be made as to how many children can safely be accommodated in any one venue. So, that's the same approach we've taken, for example, in funerals in Wales. We haven't set a specific number, different chapels, different religious settings are able to accommodate different numbers of people safely. And we have a site-specific calculation rather than a general rule. Adrian, thank you very much to Will Hayward at Wales Online. Thank you, First Minister. I want to ask you about shielding people. For July and August, when the virus was more suppressed in many parts of Wales than it is now, shielding people were told it was too dangerous for them to meet loved ones even outside. Now in parts of Wales that are in lockdown, these same people are not being asked to shield. Under what circumstances will shielding be reintroduced in Wales? Well, I know the Chief Medical Officer is considering writing out again to shielded people in Wales, not because we want to return to the rules as they were at the start of the crisis, but because we want to learn from that experience and provide people with further advice and further reassurance. As we've said many times in these sessions, there's more than one form of harm from coronavirus, and there were many shielded people whose lives were very difficult during those periods because of social isolation and the sense of pressure and well-being that not being able to go out and meet other people or do your own shopping brought with it. So, we want to continue to have a sensible approach to shielding. The advice to those people continues to be to think very carefully about the contacts that you have to take a precautionary approach, but where people are confident that they can go and collect medicines for themselves, take a walk in the park. The advice no longer seeks to prevent them from doing that because we're balancing the different harms that can be caused in those people's lives. Okay, so there's no plans for shielding in the offing then at the moment. When would you consider taking an area out of a local lockdown? Is there a cases benchmark that you'd want it to be lower than? And would an area come out gradually or all at once? And if I could just ask for clarity on weddings in Wales, numbers have been reduced from 30 to 15 in England. Can you just provide clarity on the number of numbers for wedding attendance in Wales please? Well, thank you very much. So it's a really important question that you raise. We have learnt that it is easier to put places into lockdown than it is to take them out of it. But our local lockdown measures are designed to be reversible and to be reversible when we see signs of things improving. So there will be a number of tests that we will use. Prevalence, of course, is one. The number of people in the area who are catching coronavirus. Positivity in test results is another. And we will put a number of those measures together to decide whether or not it is then safe to begin to lift those local lockdown measures. And I'm very keen that when the time is right that we move in that direction. I believe that it is more likely to be done one measure at a time rather than simply going from no measures to or all measures to no measures. We'll want to do it in a way that is careful and cautious in order to protect people's health. But the system is designed to have an exit strategy as well as an entry strategy. As to weddings, discussions are going on today with the industry with public health officials as well. What I have asked is for any evidence that having 30 people attend a wedding or a wedding breakfast has led to identifiable spikes in the virus in Wales. If that evidence exists then we will have to act to reduce the number of people who can attend. If there isn't evidence that that is causing harm then I think that will punt us in the opposite direction. But I want in the way we try to be to be directed by the actual evidence on the ground and we're exploring and collecting that today. Well, thank you very much to Josh, Sir, at the South Wales Argus. Good afternoon. Speaking in the centre of yesterday, the Health Minister said he was cautiously optimistic about this situation in Caerphilly. After two weeks of local lockdown in the area, do you share his cautious optimism? Josh, thank you. I do. And more importantly, the public health experts who are helping us to deal with Caerphilly have also told us that they are cautiously optimistic. We've seen a number of days in a row now, up to and including the figures I saw for yesterday, first thing this morning, that have shown declines in the prevalence of the disease in Caerphilly. Now, we need some more days of that before we can be completely confident that we have a sustainable pattern. But the early signs are encouraging. And if that is sustained it will be because of the efforts that people in Caerphilly have made to stick to the rules and the conditions we've had to place on them. And I was, myself, cheered up last week by a conversation with a senior police officer responsible for Caerphilly who said that in the police's experience, people in Caerphilly were not simply abiding by the regulations. They were keen to make their contribution. They wanted to do the right thing because they believed that in that way the period under which they lived with the restrictions would be lessened. And I'm very grateful indeed for all the efforts that people are making. Will the easing of restrictions in Caerphilly eventually be dependent on the success of neighbouring authorities which are also in local lockdown or could they be lifted independently of both surrounding areas? Well, there is clearly a relationship between different local authorities. The virus doesn't stop at boundaries. People's lives don't stop at administrative boundaries. But we have made the decision on each local authority on an individual basis. And if the case can be made to begin to lift the restrictions in one local authority because it is now in a different place to others then I think that is the way that we would want to approach it. But you can't get away from the fact that any one local authority is surrounded by others and you'd have to take that into account as well. Josh, thank you. Trawi Adam Hale, PA. I'm sorry to take you back with a few questions but just on the pub's closing time or the cut off of alcohol sales there. Can you explain why you've decided on your version of this rule which differs to that in England where places have to shut at 10pm? Does this version of the rule in Wales open up it to be abused perhaps and see more non-compliance? Well, we have designed our rule for a number of reasons. We've gone for 10pm for consistency across the border where anxious about displacement. You can imagine that if we hadn't done this let us say in north east Wales if pubs in Chester were shutting at 10pm and pubs in Wrexham didn't have a closing time of that sort there'd be a temptation for people to come across the border. So we've acted in concert with the UK government on the time for that reason in terms of stopping the sale of alcohol at 10pm. I've wanted to listen carefully to some of the advice we've had from the industry. We know that restaurants particularly have acted to have a pattern of two sittings during an evening. People come at 7 o'clock for a meal then between that sitting and the next there's cleaning up and coronavirus measures and then a second sitting of people arrive between 8.30 and 9 o'clock. I didn't want to have a situation in which that would be impossible and the business model that people have built up in Wales became null and void. Those businesses have generally worked really hard. They've had a real struggle this year. I wanted a system that was sympathetic to their needs. I don't think it opens up space for abuse because our experience of those sittings is the people running them are scrupulous about keeping to the rules and organising them carefully. And if there are individual examples of abuse, local authorities have the powers they need to intervene and put that right. Thank you. Given the spike of cases in the country, do you at all have any regrets opening up so many parts of life like hospitality, tourism, schools in a relatively short space of time compared to the initial slow cautious approach that you were using? Well Adam, I've spent most of my time over recent months asking questions, asking me why the Welsh Government has been so slow, why we've lagged behind, why we haven't opened up things as fast as they've been opened up across or border. So I think that has been the dominant narrative. Throughout we have tried to stick to the drumbeat that we think is right for Wales. We review the regulations every three weeks. I think we have taken a cautious approach step by step. It's why we are not having to undo some of the messages and measures as they are across our border in England. We've always said to people, work from home wherever you can. We've never urged people to get back on their bikes and get back to work. We haven't had to move today to put guidance into regulations because we've always taken that course of action here in Wales. So I think our approach actually puts us in a stronger position today than we otherwise would be. Diolch, Adam, over to Mike Hughes at LBC. Thanks very much indeed, First Minister. I'll continue on the theme of pubs if I may and I'll take you back a few questions regarding the behavioural evidence surrounding all of this. Isn't there cause for concern that by limiting the amount of time people have to consume alcohol within a public house, for instance, or elsewhere, that you are essentially in a way encouraging speed drinking and again by imposing a curfew there is the risk that people might finish up their pint at the pub and then pile back into someone's house to continue the night? Well, there are risks in any course of action that we take and of course we weighed up those points carefully in making this decision. No course of action has all pluses and no minuses. They're generally fairly closely balanced and they are in this one too. I hope that people in Wales, as I think the majority of people do, will continue to act sensibly, won't think of 10 o'clock as a race to consumers as much alcohol as you can in the last few minutes and the way in which the industry has acted over the last few months in its careful approach, in its management of those control settings, I think will be an asset to us in that. Were people to take your second course of action and think that having left the pub it's now a chance to go and have a party at home, they would be in direct breach of the regulations here in Wales. There would be no doubt at all with people about that. You would be breaking the law if that's what you did and the law is now very simple in Wales. Only six people can meet indoors and they've got to be from the same extended household. One of the reasons we simplified the regulations was to assist the police. So if they were called to a house party, all they now have to do is find out if there are more than six people there. If there are, the law is being broken and enforcement action will be taken. So I don't think it's a course of action that's to be advised to anybody. Thank you very much indeed. Through all of this now, certainly on the curfew on the sale of alcohol, you are limiting for some parts of the hospitality sector their ability to trade. Some of them purely operate within the realms of the nighttime economy, which again will be a very short window for them to trade. Some now see it as completely unviable to open in any way, shape or form and will have to remain closed. Can the sector expect some sort of support package to see them through this window? Well, as I said in answer to an earlier question, we've dried our best to balance the very real concerns about businesses and jobs with the public health emergency and some of the detail of what we are doing, which is different to elsewhere, is a response to what we have heard. My colleague Ken Skates continues to work on the third phase of our Economic Resilience Fund, and we will be looking to see what further help we can offer to businesses in Wales. At the Cobra meeting yesterday, the First Ministers of Scotland, Northern Ireland and I all made very clear to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is part of that meeting, that we need to see further help beyond the furlough scheme targeted sector-specific help for those parts of the economy that are particularly badly affected by coronavirus, and I hope that he and the UK Government heard that message from us all as loudly and as clearly as we were trying to communicate it. Thanks, Mike, to Rob Taylor at rexham.com. You've announced the £500 payment. Has that been funded via a consequential, and is it being administered as it is in England by local authorities, and if so, will councils be given extra resources to do so? And you also mentioned it's going to be a new law to stop employers making it difficult for staff to self-isolate. What's that going to entail, and how is that going to be enforced? Thanks very much, Rob. We were assured by Michael Gove, the head of the Cabinet Office, on Saturday that there would be a consequential for us. We're yet to find out how much it will be, but I just felt that it was so important to eliminate that perverse incentive, that pressure people in low-income occupations have felt to go to work when they were feeling unwell because they couldn't afford not to. That we had to do something to prevent that from happening. So we're promised a consequential, but we will go ahead. If absolutely necessary, we will find the money ourselves to make this happen because it is such an important part of our public health defence. We're working through how it will be administered. We have a choice available to us in Wales that isn't available in England. In England, they abandoned the social fund nearly a decade ago. Here we have kept the discretionary assistance fund in being. Back in February, when people were affected by the flooding, and we were providing £500 and £1,000 to assist people with that, the applications were made to the discretionary assistance fund. We administered it nationally rather than locally. We will continue to explore whether that is a swifter and less complicated way of providing the £500 here in Wales. In relation to employers, to give you just one example there, there is evidence. I don't see much of it in Wales, but there is evidence elsewhere of when employees have been obliged to self-isolate, employers have made them redundant. The regulations we will put in place in Wales will prevent that from happening. As I say, I think the vast majority of employers in Wales have acted very responsibly and have supported their workers, but where there are abuses, even when they are more prevalent elsewhere, we will change our regulations to eliminate them. Thank you. On touching back on the £500, that perverse choice was there in Wrexham during the Rowan Foods issue, and you effectively passed the book to UK government. But now you say it's a choice and it's absolutely necessary but it's unfounded. Why is that choice being made now, but couldn't be made for Wrexham earlier in this pandemic? Well, the Welsh Government has no responsibilities for income maintenance. It is absolutely a reserved responsibility, one that should be discharged by the United Kingdom. We made the case powerfully then. I wrote to the Prime Minister myself many weeks ago in the Rowan Foods context, offering two different solutions to this problem. Now either of those has been taken up by the UK government. They have now moved to a local authority administered scheme in England. I felt it was very important that we matched that here in Wales. I hope that what Michael Gove said to me and to the First Ministers of Scotland and Northern Ireland on Saturday is delivered in practice and the consequential will come to us. But I just felt we had reached a point where we couldn't have workers in Wales disadvantaged when a scheme was being put in place across our border. And that's why we've made the decision at this point. Thanks, Rob, Andrew, for grave of the Daily Post, please. Good afternoon, First Minister. I'm just picking up the point again of the Mayor about the need to avoid non-essential travel. Should people now be reconsidering taking holidays into Wales? Are they welcome now? And should people in north Wales, for example, think twice about taking trips across the border, shopping trips to local lockdown areas in north Wales, north Wales from England? Thank you, Andrew. Evidence first, isn't it? We've had visitors coming to Wales now since the early part of July. And there is no evidence that those visitors have led to local spikes in coronavirus. Coronavirus remains at its lowest levels in the holiday areas of Wales. So the visitors we have had so far have been people who have acted responsibly and helped us to keep Wales safe. I did try to persuade the Prime Minister yesterday to echo our message here in Wales of asking people to think carefully about journeys that they are making and to ask themselves whether those journeys are necessary. I noticed that he didn't do that in the messages that he has given to people in England, but I think it's a good message in all parts of the UK. It's been given by our colleagues in Scotland. I'm keen to emphasise it to people in Wales. I don't want to say to people, don't go on holiday. I do want to say to people, think carefully about the arrangements you are making. And that would apply in the opposite direction as well. I love, as you know very well, and to hundreds of people who live in north Wales and work in the north west of England. Those are necessary journeys. People have to be able to earn a living. But shopping journeys, if you can equally successfully shop closer to home and locally, I think it's a sensible question to put to people, do you have to make that journey to somewhere else when you could do that equally well closer to home? Thank you very much indeed. You mentioned earlier that people should not treat the Covid rules as a game. Do you think there is, to some degree, a false sense of security in a country now, given that people have got through the first wave of infection? Are people not frightened enough now to follow the rules correctly? Well, my view of that, Andrew, is that the considerable majority of people in Wales remain scrupulous in the way that they follow the rules, they want to do the right thing, they work hard to work out what the right thing is. But a minority of people took the wrong message from the summer. During the summer, when as people will have seen from that graph, numbers were falling all the time, we were able to lift restrictions. Some people took that as a message that coronavirus was over, that it had disappeared. That was the wrong message because clearly coronavirus is with us and I'm afraid will be with us for many weeks and months to come. So we need to repersuade those people to go back to doing all the things that we were all doing earlier in the pandemic and provided we can do that, then we will recapture that sense of broad social solidarity that led to those falling figures in the first place. I think that is a minority of people in Wales and part of the changes we are making are designed to get that message back into that part of the population. It's not all over, you could be affected, you could affect other people, please do the right thing. Andrew, thank you to Rory Sheenan of Powys County Times. Good afternoon, First Minister. Touching on visitors to Wales in the last few months, obviously mid Wales is quite a tourist hotspot all year round, but we've seen little community transmission certainly in the last few months and cases seem to have fallen quite a bit against what's happening in the rest of the country. Should any further measures be introduced, say a blanket lockdown, is there any chance that certain parts of the country could be exempt? Well it's why I want to avoid blanket measures as much as we can Rory. As you say there have been lots of visitors from outside Wales as well as from within Wales to holiday destinations and we've not got evidence that that has led to the transmission of virus into those communities. Tourism is a very important part of those local economies. So as much as possible our aim in the Welsh Government is to have a small number of national measures supplemented where necessary by local action and those people in the six local authorities in south east Wales who are living under far tighter restrictions have seen the impact in their lives. So in a way it's a slight reverse of the way you put it in your question but coming to the same place, local measures to reflect local circumstances. And obviously the current measures in place are perhaps going to have a knock on spectator sports in the country. Domestically football has returned but without crowds in Wales. Is there going to be a point though where that season might have to be curtailed or clubs are going to have to be told that it's very unlikely in the next few months that spectators will be allowed back into stadiums and grounds. So you know you please finish. So just thinking of say the forthcoming will be season and semi professional football. Well I'm afraid the outlook I think is not good. The Prime Minister said yesterday that plans in England to allow spectators at sports events were not going ahead that the pilots that have been happening in England are being postponed. We held three pilots, modest pilots here in Wales at the very start of this month including a couple of sporting events. My hope at that time was that ten days ago at the end of the last three week review I could have announced a further set of pilots with slightly larger crowds. I'm afraid even then we decided that that was not a sensible move to make in the circumstances. Since then things have got more difficult, not less difficult. The decisions across our border to pull back from some of the plans that they had made mean it's difficult to be optimistic. A body swift return of crowds to sporting events, whether they're large events in professional sport or even in the more local types of activity that we know are so important in so many communities. Tom Magna at Careers World. Tom, good morning. Thank you very much indeed First Minister. We've touched on this point before. In the opening statement that you made you urged people to help protect the NHS. Given what happened in social care in the national lockdown shouldn't you be revising that to protect the NHS and the social care? Very keen to endorse exactly that. Apologies if the short hand you end up using in making statements sometimes leaves out some important things. Of course it is completely part of our ambition to make sure that we protect social care, people who live in social care, people who work in social care in exactly the same way as we want to protect frontline workers in our health service and people who need hospital treatment. Thank you very much indeed for that. My second question you're asking people to keep using the NHS for non COVID-19 services. But with coronavirus cases on the rise, how can vulnerable unpaid family carers trust enough to allow statutory and voluntary agencies into the homes they protected for months? And does your answer vary if the house concern is in a local lockdown area? Well, first of all, I understand the dilemma and I know what a difficult dilemma it is for people who work so hard to keep coronavirus away from the door. You may remember, Tom, we had a bit of a debate here at one point about testing in care homes in Ceredigion. The local authority was not keen for local health board staff to go into those homes to administer tests because they'd had no cases of coronavirus at all. We came to a different arrangement with them where it was done by post and by care home staff doing it. Look, I completely understand the dilemma, but we all know that where people stand back from going for necessary treatment, that just causes a different set of health impacts in their life. So we saw a big fall off very early in coronavirus and people attending appointments, going for treatment. That just piles up difficulties for later on. So it's still an important message for us to give. The NHS is open for people to attend for those appointments. Many measures have been put in place to create coronavirus secure parts of hospitals, protective measures, the wearing of face coverings. All of those things has been stepped up to make it safe for people who need non-coronavirus treatments to get them. We're still saying to people in Wales, the NHS is there for you. Please make sure you use it when you need it. Finally, today to Nathan Schu Smith at the speaker. Thank you, First Minister. I want to come back to again the question first asked to you by Adrian about the closing time of POPs. The Welsh Government said last night that, quote, hospitality businesses in Wales will have to close at 10pm. Yet today you've said something very different that they will just have to stop saying alcohol rather than actually close. And you confirm that there's not a time that they have to close. And this is obviously going to cause quite a lot of confusion with the two statements conflicting largely. What advice has the Welsh Government issued to the hospitality sector? Well, if there is any confusion, let me just clear it up for people because Adrian, I thought, captured it very well in what he said to me. It's the equivalent of the old drinking up time. So those of us who remember it, no new customers could come in at that point, no further drinks could be ordered after 11 o'clock at night, but people had time after that to finish off their drink, to finish off whatever they were doing. That is the system we are going to have here in Wales. It's very straightforward. It's very well known. And I think people will very quickly get used to what we are proposing. And just come back on that for next question. I asked if the Welsh Government has issued new advice to the hospitality sector because what was released last night is contrary to what you've said today? Well, I just don't accept, Nathan, this contrary in the way that you are suggesting. We are working at huge speed in the Welsh Government to get all of this in place. We were in conversations with the hospitality sector a lot yesterday. We will revise the guidance, of course, but we will do it with the sector. It's inevitable when things are being done at such a speed that some messages need to be clarified or reinforced. That's what we will do, but the position is very straightforward and we'll be very quickly understood. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you all very much once again. Thank you.