Diolch, Ddirprwy Lywydd. I move our amendments to this very broad, but very useful, debate.

The Plaid leader’s war cry in the election was that her party has nothing in common with the Tories and wouldn’t work with us. Yet, only last week, they called for an arm’s-length body for economic development—a long-standing Welsh Conservative policy—and here we are again, drawing attention to common cause, reflecting what might be a little bit uncomfortable for Leanne Wood, but which is a source of hope, I think, for voters: that opposition parties can work together to challenge the stale old status quo. We are supporting this motion, and we are supporting amendment 4.

There is no material difference between Plaid’s NHS medical care homes and our plans for the innovative use of community hospitals, backed by a development fund. Some of those buildings will, of course, be beyond accommodating new ways of providing localised treatment in care, and the argument remains then for sustainable multi-purpose replacements. However, more modern facilities, like Gellinudd, Cimla and Maesgwyn in my own region, were closed, with the inevitable loss of beds, to help justify the under-use of the private finance initiative hospital in Baglan and to avoid the institutionalisation of patients. Well, now, too many elderly, frail patients are becoming institutionalised in expensive acute beds as step-down care is rare, and homecare packages are delayed. Sometimes that care at home is not meeting needs, with re-admissions due to failures in support. So, of course we’re in agreement on point 2(a) of the motion. A cross-party commission on the long-term sustainable provision of care in Wales, as called for by the Welsh Conservatives, would help gather the evidence and identify whether the changes that Plaid proposes would work or not. Such a commission would gather the evidence to underpin legislation to require health and social care providers to work collaboratively, delivering a more organic integration of both systems rather than a massive structural tsunami. Under our proposals, Wales would have a £10 million care innovation fund to promote that joint working at all levels, including convalescence and re-ablement, and which responds to the challenges of geography.

It’s all good, isn’t it, that the Welsh Conservative and Plaid manifestos committed—both of us—to the introduction of specialism in the rural delivery of medicine? I wonder whether you’ve raised that rather inconvenient common ground by agreeing that mobile units delivering cancer treatment would be a useful contribution to equalising access to treatments in rural and deprived areas, or are you going to disagree with us just to distance yourself from us? Myself, I think that supporting our second amendment would be a very encouraging sign to the voters of Wales that our equal number of votes in this Chamber are being used to hold this Labour Government to account on its failure when it comes to equalities in access to health services.

So, let’s not forget our first amendment. The stay-at-home assessments would help prevent crises that need high-end health and social care intervention by helping citizens plan ahead—that’s the difference with what’s happening primarily now—for ways to maximise their chances of independent living when age-related medical conditions and events, physical or mental, might make living at home more difficult, in the way that they want to do. It costs a fraction of the £21 million that our NHS is currently spending on keeping people in acute beds for 27 days on average as a result of delayed transfers of care. Of course, it will help some avoid the need to move into residential care in the first place—on which, the big society is still alive and well on these benches when it comes to personal care. Welsh Conservatives see the advantages of including mutuals and co-ops in the provision of first-class care—something else that Plaid and other Tories have, embarrassingly, in common.

We also recognise Plaid’s ambition for increasing the number of GPs, and the wider need for more training places in Wales to improve the capacity of the NHS where it’s needed, including the areas that you’ve identified. We’ll continue to argue for more specialist nurses, nurse prescribers and nurse consultants in the Welsh NHS, too. Do you agree with us on that, or is that too Tory for you as well?

Finally, the motion acknowledges that older people need health services more than most. The older people’s commissioner will be championing an increasing number of people in the next two decades and needs to be more powerful in terms of powerful interventions. It’s just one of the reasons why Welsh Conservatives believe that the role of the older people’s commissioner should be reviewed, and the commissioner made accountable to this Assembly—a critical friend of Government, but accountable to the people of Wales. I’d be curious to know whether on the basis of that you’ll be prepared to support this amendment, or whether you will show yourselves to be different from the Tories, to be an uncritical friend of Labour, whose anti-Tory war cry drowns out Wales’s call for constructive collaborative opposition to challenge and scrutinise Government. Thanks.