Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. The Cabinet Secretary spoke for us all when he said we must never forget those who courageously gave their lives to protect the freedoms that we have today. And this isn’t an occasion for making party political points, in my opinion, on the eve of Remembrance Day, and if we are, from time to time, constructively critical of the Cabinet Secretary, it’s only because we’re trying to help him do his job even better than he does already. And we know his heart is in the right place.

One of the great privileges I’ve had in the short time I’ve been in this place was to go on behalf of the Assembly to the commemorations in Mametz Wood a few months ago, which was a very affecting occasion. I would like to commend the Government for the many initiatives that they’ve taken, and which are enumerated in the statement: the package of support and the various other things, like the armed forces employability pathway and Supporting Service Children in Education Wales in particular. It’s very important that we help service families and those who are ex-service, particularly, to reintegrate into civil society. They often have very specific difficulties to cope with and need a lot of official help. So, I don’t propose to make cavilling points of criticism about the extent to which any of these packages may be improved on this occasion; I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other opportunities for us to that.

I would just like to draw attention also to the housing issue. Again, 25 per cent of all the individual cases that the Royal British Legion gets are related to housing problems, and it is a national disgrace, I think, not just in Wales but in the United Kingdom, that there are 8,000 veterans who are homeless at this moment and not properly catered for. I very much look forward to hearing the details of the health referral pathway on 10 November. Presumably there’ll be another statement where we can explore the details of that, because one of the problems that servicepeople have is that there’s very often a great deal of uncertainty about the content of their entitlements under local housing allocation policies and, perhaps, his pathway statement will throw some light upon that.

There’s only one issue that I would like to raise, because it hasn’t been raised hitherto, and that’s in respect of social care costs for injured veterans. The Cabinet Secretary will be well aware of the discrimination against those with pre-2005 injuries, as opposed to those afterwards in relation to the disregards of social care costs. I know that the Government has made great strides to improve the situation by raising the disregard from £10 to £25. But there is a particular injustice, I think, in as much as also this personnel, in comparison with the civilian pensioners, are at a disadvantage, because civilian pensioners can invest their compensation awards in a trust fund, which is fully disregarded. Perhaps the Cabinet Secretary might give us some reflection on that, but, otherwise, that’s all I propose to say this afternoon.