Thank you very much, Llywydd. I move amendments 1 and 2 in the name of Plaid Cymru. I want to start by congratulating the children’s commissioner, not only on the annual report, but for her work over the past year. I know, of course, that that work is based on firm foundations following the ‘What Next?’ consultation—the biggest consultation ever with children and young people, carried out by the commissioner’s office, with over 7,000 children and young people responding. That was a firm foundation for identifying priorities, planning a programme of work and, of course, driving some of these recommendations contained in the report forward.

The first amendment is tabled quite simply not because I’m not happy to note the children’s commissioner’s annual report—of course I’m happy to do that—but I just don’t think that noting the report is enough. It doesn’t seem to do justice to the recommendations contained within the report. I believe that it would be beneficial for us to send a stronger message to reflect how determined we are to tackle the issues that have been highlighted in this report.

Therefore, in addition to noting the report, as the first amendment suggests, I would say that we should decide to take action on those recommendations. It’s a clear statement of support, a vote of confidence in the children’s commissioner and a statement that we are standing shoulder to shoulder with her and with children and young people in Wales, by not just acknowledging problems but to be more purposeful in placing more emphasis on tackling those problems. But I do hear the Cabinet Secretary’s comments that the Government will respond, but I just think that the message from this place this afternoon would be much stronger if we were to accept the amendment.

Of course, we do welcome the ambitious new targets for child and adolescent mental health services, but, as the commissioner states, it is a very inconsistent picture across Wales. Some services have reduced waiting times very significantly. Betsi Cadwaladr University Local Health Board in north Wales is one of them, going down from 550 waiting to 82 young people waiting. It’s the most dramatic fall that we’ve seen in Wales perhaps. But then we look at the figures in somewhere such as Abertawe Bro Morgannwg, and we see an increase in the numbers waiting, up to 630 children and young people waiting to be seen by CAMHS services—over 200 of them waiting longer than 14 weeks. Those figures are very different to the figures for adult mental health services, where the numbers waiting are far lower in all health boards. So, progress has been slow in some areas and has been inconsistent across Wales, and I do feel that we need a stronger statement of intent to tackle those problems.

The importance of advocacy, of course, and ensuring that children in receipt of care have access to independent advocacy is particularly important, particularly after the Waterhouse inquiry found that those who had been physically and sexually abused over a period of decades in north Wales care homes weren’t believed. Nobody listened to them, to all intents and purposes. The previous children’s commissioner mentioned his frustration at the slow pace of response to recommendations that he made for independent advocacy in ‘Missing Voices’ and in the report that followed that, ‘Missing Voices: Missing Progress’. The need to implement a national approach to statutory advocacy for children and young people is now the subject of an inquiry by the Children, Young People and Education Committee here in the Assembly. We are still awaiting confirmation as to whether local authorities and the Welsh Government will implement a national model for statutory advocacy services in accordance with the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014.

Finally, and this is an issue that I have raised with the First Minister previously, there is no legal requirement for parents to register with the local authority if they educate their children at home, and neither is there any requirement on local authorities to monitor or to inspect the home teaching provision. That isn’t acceptable, in my view. In her report, the commissioner raises the issue in the context of the death of Dylan Seabridge. He was home educated and he had no contact with public services during the seven years prior to his death. I understand the concern among a number of people that there is risk of us tarring everyone with the same brush in trying to tackle that risk, but whilst there is an element of risk to one child in Wales, then I don’t think that it’s an overreaction for us to go further than what we have seen happening in the past. It’s not acceptable, in my view, that the current situation should persist. We need to tackle this issue as a matter of urgency.

The second amendment, of course, refers to the need to transfer responsibility for the children’s commissioner from the Government to the National Assembly. This is an issue that has been aired in this context and in the context of other commissioners in the past. I do believe that the arguments as they were put forward then are just as valid today, and I also believe that it would be desirable for the Assembly to support that amendment. That, of course, is also the view of the commissioner herself, and we shouldn’t forget that within this debate.