Thank you for the comments. I’ll start with the last points that you were mentioning on clinical exceptionality and/or need. The reality is that we already have a system providing evidence on what should be provided. Need is very much a part of it—whether it’s something that is clinically effective—but you can’t get away from the reality of resource as well. The NHS has a budget to work to in every part of the argument and every healthcare system. If we simply say that it doesn’t matter what the price is—. We regularly have negotiations with pharmaceutical companies about patient access schemes, and, in fact, within Wales, since it was introduced in 2012, by delivering a patient access scheme where the pharmaceutical company agree to change their price to get access, that’s meant that 36 new medicines have been available in Wales as a result of that. So, we’ve always got to be able to balance that properly, and if we’re going to have an honest debate about the future of high-cost medicines, we do need to set out—. But there are times you do have to talk to pharmaceutical companies about the price for which a medicine is provided. It was part of the reason why the cancer drugs fund failed because there was no control over pricing, as well as the lack of control over the clinical evidence that a treatment was actually going to be effective.

The reason why exceptionality is in is because we’re reviewing where we are and making recommendations for the future. We’ve been completely clear in the terms of reference that if the review group believe that exceptionality is not the appropriate criteria and there is a better formulation of that, then we want to hear from them, because I want the recommendations that I make to be really practical for us as well. And, indeed, if they say that, for all of the challenges about exceptionality, it is the right criteria, we need to understand how we deal with that more effectively.

That goes back to your first point, really, and that’s about the relationship between the consultant and the patient, because we’ve been really clear again in the terms of reference—we’ve got to understand that with that interface, when someone wants to understand what the treatment options are and what’s available, there’s got to be a way for both the treating consultant and the patient to understand what is available and why, and if you’re going to go through an individual funding request, what that really means too as well. So, we’ve got to equip our clinicians to have those difficult conversations in the most consistent manner possible, so that people don’t come out and think that it’s either the health board area they live in or the consultant they see that actually governs what their access to effective treatment is. So, that is a really important and a very difficult challenge for us to get over.

Just finally—I’ll finish on this point, Deputy Presiding Officer—I had a very constructive meeting yesterday with the Wales Cancer Alliance, and they were interested in my statement today. I indicated that I wouldn’t be giving them an advance copy of what I was going to say or the membership of the panel of the IPFR review, but they’re interested in what we’re doing and they, too, still want to see more consistency. They want it to be an evidence-led process, but there also wasn’t support for a process that advantaged their group of conditions over others. So, having that genuine equity across the piece and having a genuine evidence base to govern what we’re doing was really important to them too. So, there’s a whole range of actors in the field who are looking at what we’re going to do and why, and I look forward to hearing from the review panel in the relatively near future.