Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. It gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate tabled by UKIP today. I’d like to move amendment 1 and amendment 4 tabled in the name of Paul Davies.

Amendment 2 regrets that the number of female lung cancer cases in Wales has increased by more than a third over the last decade. In fact, the rate for women in Wales is amongst the highest in Europe and has climbed from 54.8 per cent cases per 100,000 to 69.2 per cent, which is, by anybody’s standards, quite a significant jump. We also move amendment 4, which is to ask that the Welsh Government should improve access to screening, education and awareness.

Now, in the Welsh Government amendment to this motion, I note, Cabinet Secretary, that you mentioned that there is an extra £1 million for end-of-life care. May I ask you to clarify if that is just for lung cancer, for cancer services, or for all end-of-life and whether it would include adults and children, because, of course, that would predicate the amount of money that we might think might come towards people who are suffering with lung cancer? In the amendment, Cabinet Secretary, you also mention the cancer delivery plan and I’d be most grateful if you would clarify what weight, in the refreshed cancer delivery plan, will be given to lung cancer outcomes, because, as Caroline Jones so ably put it, there are more deaths in Wales from lung cancer than breast or bowel combined, and yet it’s a far less well known cause in terms of raising funds for research.

Cabinet Secretary, I’m not arguing that lung cancer should have special treatment—far from it. However, as such a huge cause of illness, especially in those from less affluent areas, it does deserve to receive equitable treatment. We need to break the stigma that lung cancer is a smoker’s disease. We need more awareness in the public and within the medical profession to ensure that better early diagnosis that would ensure better survival rates. As Caroline has already mentioned, one-year survival rates in Wales are among the lowest in Europe, and yet stage 1 lung cancer can be survived if diagnosed early enough.

Sadly, the postcode lottery does exist in lung cancer diagnosis. Potentially treatable stage 1 lung cancer survival rates are 90 per cent in the least deprived areas of Wales and that’s something to be applauded and something to be very grateful for. Yet, if you are a poor person, if you live in one of the most deprived areas of Wales, your chances of surviving lung cancer drop to only 74 per cent. That is a vast gulf—a vast divide—between those who are more affluent and those who are far more deprived. One-year survival rates are the lowest in all of the UK and the second lowest in Europe.

Early diagnosis can deliver a dramatically different outcome. I just want to tell you a brief story of somebody who has been in correspondence with me. His wife was lucky enough to receive early diagnosis because, as he puts it, it was a GP who thought outside of the box and therefore treatment was speedy. Initially, his wife was given a terminal diagnosis—an awful thought, given that she was only 43 years of age. But there was a great response to radiotherapy, a proactive oncologist who found a great surgeon and the inoperable became operable. Currently, the scans, 18 months later, are clear. I share this story, because he says, ‘I am internet savvy; I pushed for treatment; I paid for scans in England and I spent a lot of time following NHS paper chains to find the right treatment or the right specialist, and I had outstanding support from the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation’. Cabinet Secretary, many people are not as lucky as this man and his wife.

The third point that I really want to raise—. We’ve talked about getting rid of the stigma, we’ve talked about the importance of early diagnosis leading to greater survival rates, and finally, Cabinet Secretary, surely, we need to see a greater proportion of research funding going towards lung cancer. Lung cancer contributes to 22 per cent of all cancer deaths, but only receives 7 per cent of total cancer research funding. Surely, this is yet another inequality we need to try to right to stop those in poorer areas being more likely to die from it, to give more research funding towards this less fashionable cause, a smoker’s cause, with that stigma attached to it, and yet a cause that kills more people in Wales than bowel cancer and breast cancer put together.