Can I thank you for that series of questions? I’ll start with the new treatment fund. We expect the financial envelope that we have announced and placed upon it to be adequate to deal with the medications we would expect. That’s based on our previous experience and some horizon scanning of likely treatments that can come on board and the high-cost medications we’ve dealt with in the past. In all of this, there is an element of forecast and there’s always an element to look at what happens if the facts do change. So, if the facts change, we need to come back to the Chamber and we’ll come back in terms of those budgetary discussions. That’s just a point of being honest, but I do think it’s adequate to deal with the expectations that we place upon the fund.

In terms of the point you make about clinicians being up to date on what is available, well, clinicians can’t contract out of their individual professional responsibility, and I don’t think it’s a matter for the Government to continually tell clinicians, ‘This is what NICE is currently recommending or making available for treatment’. I know from my previous life, from having been a professional, that it was my individual responsibility to make sure that I was up to date and up to speed with what the law required me to do, previously. But I do think that the initial publicity that the new treatment fund is likely to get—. But the ongoing work of the new treatment fund, I would expect that clinicians would not be looking to say that there are excuses for not understanding what treatment is available or the support that is available within their health board and on a national level to ensure that new and innovative treatments that have been made available are there and are available for the patients whom they have responsibilities for directly. I think our clinicians are a pretty conscientious bunch at doing that, but if he wants me to take up the individual issue that he referred to then I’d be happy to do so and understand how that has happened, because that certainly isn’t something that I would want to see repeated.

On the funding for this, you mentioned the PPRS—the pharmaceutical price reduction scheme. Income is actually dropping on the PPRS because of a change in rules. So, it’s a really significant challenge for all the devolved administrations and, indeed, for NHS England. They anticipate a significant hole in their budget as a result of the scheme dropping, and it is a matter where NHS England and Department of Health officials are looking again at the rules for the scheme to try and look again to make sure that people aren’t avoiding their responsibility to pay into the scheme. So, that in itself isn’t a stable amount of income to try and actually use to try and fund any particular commitments. So, that does bring for us extra pressure right across the health budget. So, it’s a challenge for us to manage, and that’s just honest. That goes back to the point about budget discipline as well, because our expectation is that, after 12 months, health boards should be able to properly plan what they’re supposed to do for their population. Many of these medications are for a relatively small group of patients, and we expect the price for these treatments to be properly planned for and then delivered after 12 months of additional space to allow them to do so. Again, that goes into our previous experience of how the system has been run and managed. If any health board isn’t able to live within its means, well we have an architecture around that for individual accountability; we have the escalation process and, of course, the potential to have health board accounts qualified if they aren’t able to live within their means. They’re doing all the different things that we asked them to do, that we expect them to do, and we empower them to do as well. So, there is a significant piece of work for each health board to do. Broadly, I think, our health boards discharge that responsibility seriously and sensibly.

On the points you made about welcoming the IPFR review, I’m grateful to you for the comments made today but also the discussion that we have had prior to this time. The review will be genuinely independent. The review will be publicised through the summer. It will be open for people to submit evidence to it, and we will also expect to try and manage and empower some engagement from stakeholders around that too, in particular to ensure that the patient voice is made real, so that the review panel themselves can properly understand the patient voice and experience, having gone through the process as a patient. So, I am mindful of those points as we take this matter forward but I expect that, when I update Members in September, you will be able to have some confidence in the work of the panel, but also to see that the sort of concerns you wanted raised and addressed will generally have been dealt with in that way. Also, the report, of course, will be made available without any amendment from anyone in Government.