Thank you. You’re right to identify that paying for social care and coming to a sustainable, secure long-term future for social care is critically important, given the pressures that you have identified on public services and the aging population, and people’s quite rightly ever-increasing expectations of the kind of social care that they will be able to receive as well. So, I am very alive to this issue, particularly the issue that you mention of differentials in pay as well. Local authority staff do tend to be paid well above the statutory minimum, but they do tend to be paid better than those in the voluntary sector, who in turn tend to be paid better than those in the private sector, who tend to be at the minimum as well. So, there’s a differential there, and there’s important work that we need to do in terms of raising the status of people who work in the care sector in Wales as well, and making it an attractive field for people to come into as well. We need to have career progression, and so on. Care work needs to be valued, because there’s no more important job, really, than caring for the most vulnerable people in our society.

The responsibility for setting pay levels resides with the providers themselves, but we do have some levers in Welsh Government that we can use to try and deal with this. They include a two-tier code, which I’m happy to write to the Member with some more information about. That does ensure that local authorities, when they outsource services to an independent sector, can’t lower the kinds of terms and conditions that the people who are employed can expect. We’re also currently consulting on proposals, using powers under the new Regulation and Inspection of Social Care (Wales) Act 2016, to increase transparency on pay and reinforce compliance with statutory requirements. That includes paying for members of staff travelling between seeing clients as well.