NON-ESSENTIAL retailers should be able to open in Wales ahead of their English counterparts - but the First Minister wants to avoid towns like Broughton, Saltney and Wrexham becoming "honeypots" for shoppers over the border.

Mr Drakeford told Monday's Welsh Government press conference that it was unlikely businesses in Wales would lose out to competition in England when the non-essential retail sector is allowed to reopen over the border.

He said, if the situation continues to improve, then non-essential retail should reopen in Wales before England - but that brings its own problems should people want to travel to Wales from areas with higher rates of infection to shop.

He said: "The border has always been an issue.

"There are no plans [in England] to begin the re-opening non-essential retail until well into April so I think the chance are that we will begin the reopening of those businesses earlier here in Wales.

"The figures that I've set out today are still significantly better in Wales than across the border, that would give us the opportunity to reopen parts of non-essential retail.

"But I will think very carefully about how we do it so that we don't have the opposite problem, which is that we have people coming into Wales when are shops are beginning to reopen from parts of England where coronavirus is still in major circulation."

He added: "I have never been keen on border policing.

"It's always been for me making sure that we have a sensible approach in which we don't allow people from high infection areas to travel into low infection areas, bringing that virus with them.

"When we begin the opening of non-essential retail we will try and do it in a way that does not create honeypots circumstances in which people cannot go shopping in their part of their part of the United Kingdom but are attracted to come into Wales.

"These challenges are there, they are real, particularly in the north east of Wales where the population is so fluid across the border."

Mr Drakeford added that the opening of non-essential retail and schools in Wales should help shape the reopening of the hospitality sector.

The First Minister said: "We will provide a date as soon as the public health position is safe enough for us to do so.

"It will a reliable date that people will be able to act on - not a date in the future where things can happen to make it implausible."

With schools the priority, and some non-essential retail set to follow, if rates continue downward, he said it will be the review late in March before a "start to the hospitality industry" may be offered.

"If all of that is done safely, and numbers in Wales continue to improve, we will allow for other sectors to open," said Mr Drakeford.

"The timetable in Wales will not be that different to anywhere else if that works. But public health is our first concern."

Mr Drakeford was speaking after saying there are “encouraging signs that the worst of the second wave is hopefully behind us” in Wales.

Mr Drakeford said more than 100,000 people in Wales had received both doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, accounting for more than 3% of the population.

The seven-day incidence rate of coronavirus across Wales has fallen to 64 cases per 100,000 people, with the rate below 100 cases per 100,000 people in every part of Wales.

Wales’ R rate remains below 1 and the total number of coronavirus-related patients in hospital has fallen below 1,500.

“All of these are encouraging signs that the worst of the second wave is hopefully behind us and we can look forward together with confidence to more positive days and weeks ahead of us,” Mr Drakeford said.