I’m delighted to join with you in celebrating the fantastic contribution made by nearly 1 million volunteers in Wales. I note that Volunteering Week was extended this year from 1-12 June, and we must also celebrate the extension associated with the Queen’s ninetieth birthday and her contribution, having been the patron of more than 600 charities and organisations.

As you said, we can all imagine the additional strain on our public services if the myriad of community groups and charities were not there at the front line. As you rightly said, we also want to make sure the funding we invest in support for volunteers provides the best value for money, and, you’re keen to renew your bond with the third sector and maximise the potential for volunteering—and the opportunity certainly exists for that. How would you address concerns that that smarter, best-value-for-money, invest-to-save approach hasn’t been embraced? At the end of the last Assembly, for example, Welsh Government cuts to child contact centres and cuts to funding for specialist intervention services supporting families through their relationship breakdown will impact on other services, generating far higher costs, for example, for health, education and social services; or the 9 per cent cut to local county voluntary charities, which Flintshire Local Voluntary Council said in a letter to me would devastate their ability to support more user-led preventative and cost-effective services. In other words, using the more limited money smarter, we can safeguard those services by working differently.

How do you respond to the statement by the Wales Council for Voluntary Action that Welsh Government and the sector need to refresh current engagement mechanisms, to develop, promote and monitor a programme for action based on co-production and common ground? Their report on citizen-directed support said that there’s scope for local authorities, health boards and the third sector to work much more imaginatively to develop better services that are closer to people, more responsive to needs and add value by drawing on community resources. In fact, replacing hierarchies, power and control with real engagement, better lives and more cohesive communities.

In terms of your pledge, or your ambition, to work more closely with the sector in your statement, how will you engage with the newly launched co-production network for Wales? I was a guest at that launch on 26 May in mid Wales with representatives from the public sector and the third sector from every corner of Wales—a packed event, with presentations ranging from Monmouthshire County Council to a session I co-chaired with an officer from Flintshire County Council. The findings that that group reported included: campaigning for change within the Welsh Government, turning the system upside down, challenging people and the systems that restrict us. That working group, as I said, I co-chaired, and that presentation was made by an officer. I was the only politician around the table, so it was hardly a partisan event. Responding to, perhaps, Professor Edgar Cahn, the Washington civil rights lawyer, who developed the concept of co-production to explain how important neighbourhood-level support systems are for families and communities and how they can be rebuilt—he spoke at that event. This is a movement that began in the 1970s; it wasn’t a response to austerity, it was how to tackle deeply rooted problems in communities—in that case, in America, but they also exist here. I’ll finish at that point.