I thank the UKIP’s spokesperson for her series of comments and questions. I’ll just start at the beginning with the unfortunate but necessary.

When you say that the—. The Government doesn’t accept that there is a crisis, and I think the language really matters. We accept there’s a very real challenge, and it’s particular in different parts of Wales, and there’s a challenge right across the UK and internationally, but it’s not something that is about to imminently fall over within the next day. So, I’m really clear about the language. That doesn’t mean that staff aren’t under pressure; it doesn’t mean there aren’t services under pressure; it doesn’t mean that change is going to be avoided or is going to be easy. But when we look at this—and I’ll deal with the point you made earlier about how we’re supporting staff—we’ve actually worked with primary care to make sure that we’ve got better access to occupational health support for staff within those settings. So, it’s a positive move we’ve already made forward. That’s part of what we’re trying to do, working alongside the wider primary care profession.

I’ll deal with your winter pressure comments and questions as well. Part of the challenge about every winter is that we know that we will face, inevitably, more people coming into hospital who are generally going to be older and sicker; as our population ages, that’s a profile we’ll have. Interestingly, the numbers are smaller in winter, but the need is greater. So, that’s why we have our different challenges. I regularly get told by some people that there’s no such thing as winter pressure any more, the pressure is year-round, but we know very well the profile of people who need access to healthcare support does change, and it is more acute when it comes to winter. Part of the solution isn’t just about trying to increase capacity within secondary care, it is about how we work to avoid people being admitted in the first place, to avoid them going into a hospital. If your experience is that you go into an accident and emergency department and you don’t get admitted, if you could have been cared for in your own home and could have been spared that experience, that’s eminently preferable.

So, it’s also then about how we work with different partners, not just to keep people in their own homes, but also to get people back to their own homes as soon as possible. So, it’s about admissions avoidance, and also reducing delayed transfers of care. And there should be reason for some optimism, because we have a range of different examples across Wales of where that admissions avoidance works and works well, and it’s almost always because GPs and the wider primary care workforce are engaged with social care and housing partners to understand who is at greatest risk of potentially needing admission to hospital, and then what you do to make sure that person is properly supported to make sure either that they don’t need to go in or that they can be repatriated to their own home, with appropriate support, if they do need an admission and hospital-based care.

Our challenge, as ever, is to learn across the whole system, doing that more consistently and at pace across the system. So, I won’t pretend that winter is going to be a breeze. It would be a foolish Minister in any Government of any political shade that said that nothing will go wrong in winter. There are bound to be pressures and challenges, and the biggest challenge won’t be for me, it’ll be for staff within the service in trying to deliver a high quality of care whilst demand is rising. But, like I said, I think the approach we have here, which we should be really proud of, is the ambition to have more care closer to home and actually properly recognise the whole-system approach, the whole of healthcare, with social care and with partners in housing in particular.

Finally, I’ll deal with your point about primary care clusters and about money going to primary care to help support some of our ambitions about the money that people can spend themselves. I indicated in the statement, and I’ve said before in this Chamber, that the £10 million for clusters has been allocated for them to spend. They have to work alongside their local health boards, but it is fundamentally money that they have within their own control. So, that is new money that’s getting to the front line, and equally it’s being spent on delivering more front-line staff. Lots of clusters have decided to employ clinical pharmacists. GPs recognise that has real benefit. So, there are more staff that are being introduced, but there’s a range of different professions that each cluster will choose to employ, and how they choose to deploy their money with their partners. The reason why they exist is to make sure that people can manage and understand their local healthcare populations, to manage that healthcare and to deliver the very best for that population.

So, I would not expect to see the money spent in exactly the same way in every single cluster, but it has got to be about each of those primary care clusters having the ability to decide what to do, to decide how the health gain will be met, and actually to be able to get on and spend their money. That’s the point that I made when I met NHS vice-chairs this week: we need to see the money getting through to the front line, and I do not want to be in a position where clusters complain to me they had significant plans to make real differences but they were not able to get the money through local health boards. After the first year, I think there were complaints, but I don’t expect to see those problems arise within this year at all.