Angela Burns: Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Cabinet Secretary, the Welsh Conservatives are delighted to hear about the children’s health plan that you are proposing, because this is at the heart of this debate. The reason we brought this is because, whilst you highlighted a great number of initiatives within health, within education—all of which are welcome—it’s about driving a theme, it’s...
Angela Burns: I’m not sure trampolining would sustain me, actually, David Melding. [Laughter.] I don’t want to break any other bones. But it’s about catching the young and changing their lifestyles and changing their expectations. The other thing we haven’t touched upon is this: a healthy, emotionally resilient individual who at 18, 19 or 20 goes into a job or goes into higher education will...
Angela Burns: Will the First Minister outline which industry sectors he visited on his recent trip to the United States?
Angela Burns: Minister—sorry, leader of the house—I understand that, obviously, the strategic action plan’s only been in place for some five or six months now, but what we really need to see is how the gaps in the provision of services, particularly for adults, are going to be filled. Within Pembrokeshire, there’s a massive gap in the provision of services for adults with autism and neither...
Angela Burns: Cabinet Secretary, I just wonder, before you launched this Bill or indeed popped it into your manifesto before the Assembly elections, whether you considered reviewing the qualifying criteria. Did you look at all as to how many people who have bought their homes then stayed in them for successive years and, indeed, decades, or passed them down to their families? Because, of course, when...
Angela Burns: 5. Will the Cabinet Secretary outline what the Welsh Government has done to increase transparency within local government? OAQ(5)0112(FLG)
Angela Burns: Thank you for that answer, Cabinet Secretary. My understanding is that the current White Paper, though, has dropped the obligation for councillors to publish an annual report to increase transparency and to allow voters to see what their representatives have been doing. I wondered if you could perhaps explain that a little bit further and explain why that requirement has been watered down...
Angela Burns: Diolch, Lywydd. Good afternoon, Cabinet Secretary. Thank you very much for bringing forward this statement today. I would also like to put on record my thanks to the review panel for conducting this and my thanks to you for involving all the opposition parties so comprehensively in this entire process. I’d also like to thank the great many members of the public. Particularly, I know that a...
Angela Burns: Thank you very much, Presiding Officer, for your reassuring statement on the matters that you have just mentioned. Thank you, Jeremy Miles, for pulling us all together—a disparate group of people—to bring forward a debate on the blue economy. I’m very grateful that you have done so. Our oceans are probably the single most important resource, which is why, in this debate, we are calling...
Angela Burns: Absolutely. Of course, Oscar.
Angela Burns: I think you make a very good point. Just to reinforce the business case, Cabinet Secretary, the Milford Haven waterway, as part of the Swansea bay city deal, has got a massive funding project to design the Pembroke Dock marina—it’s to do renewable energy device design, fabrication, testing. The sector that they are aiming for is absolutely vast, they’re looking at bringing a huge amount...
Angela Burns: Good afternoon, First Minister. Could you perhaps just give us an overview of what monitoring arrangements are in place to ensure that the funds that have gone to the health boards for this very worthy initiative are being spent on just this initiative?
Angela Burns: Cabinet Secretary, people talk about this in tones of shock and horror as if it’s a surprise, but it’s certainly not a surprise to me when looking at some of the integrated medium term plans. Could you please confirm which of the health boards’ IMTPs showed a deficit from the beginning of this funding round? Could you also confirm to me where you see the health boards could review their...
Angela Burns: I did not say that.
Angela Burns: Diolch, Llywydd. I’d like to raise a point of order, Presiding Officer. I have absolutely no problem with the rough and tumble of politics. What I do have an objection to is being deliberately misquoted. I know what I said, because I was very, very clear, because I wanted to make sure that people in these health boards are reassured. What I did say was that I know that—and I think I...
Angela Burns: 6. Will the Cabinet Secretary outline what the Welsh Government is doing to improve access to GP services? OAQ(5)0145(HWS)
Angela Burns: Diolch, Presiding Officer. Cabinet Secretary, what assessment have you made of the rates of ill health and absences within the Welsh NHS?
Angela Burns: Let me give you a little bit of help on that one then. The data that the Welsh Conservatives have obtained from health boards show that anxiety, stress, depression and other unspecified psychiatric illnesses affected 7,945 NHS staff members in 2015-16. Those 7,945 staff members racked up a total of 345,957 days of absence, which is equivalent to 948 years of person hours that were lost to the...
Angela Burns: I couldn’t agree with you more that this is an issue that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. It’s more than just the individual. Yesterday, we had a long discussion about the deficits that we are seeing in the Welsh NHS in some of our trusts. We know that we have a recruitment issue—we can’t get enough doctors, nurses and all the other staff. We also know that, for example,...
Angela Burns: Thank you for that answer, but I wonder if you are intending to—or are working with the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales? Because, of course, you recently published a report that was entitled ‘GP Services in Wales: The Perspective of Older People’, and it highlighted that far too many of the older population find making an appointment challenging, find the GP service inflexible...
