:...The £7 million the Welsh Government made
available to fill the massive gaps that the UK Government failed to
offer freelancers who couldn't prove that they'd been freelancers
for two or three years is very, very serious. As said earlier in a question to the Minister, if we're
talking about 250,000 people, somebody's worked out that if we gave
them each £2,500 it would add up to £40 million, and we clearly
haven't got those sorts of resources. There have always been people
who drift off out of the industry when they haven't got work, the
so-called resting actors who are brickies or taxi drivers, but that
work doesn't exist either, so I think it is really, really
desperate for those who haven't got work and can't turn to
alternative sources of work. For people like
musicians, there is no light at the end of the
tunnel at the moment, there really isn't, and that is a very, very
serious problem, particularly with the amount that we really
applaud our music and our musical culture—it's very, very serious
indeed.
I think that there are very good examples, which I spoke about in
a previous debate, of organisations changing the way they do
things, like the Sherman and Rubicon Dance, but how possible is
it? It seems totally impossible for musicians at
the moment to operate at all, unless we can get them into
providing entertainment in care homes and other places like that,
where people are depressed for different reasons. Maybe that is a
way in which we could give people work rather than just grants,
which won't go very far. Thank you very much.
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