I certainly welcome this report. The monitoring of how our public sector bodies comply with their equality duties is essential, and only this week we’ve seen Rhondda Cynon Taf council criticised for spending £80,000 on a bus station revamp, whilst omitting to make step-free access provision so that it’s available for all. This demonstrates the utmost importance of this annual debate, and how critical it is for the Welsh Government to actually work hard to ensure their equality policies are enforced across Wales.

I welcome the figures noted in relation to procurement in public sector procurement, showing that £1.1 billion invested and that £232 million went directly on salaries to Welsh citizens, £706 million with Welsh-based businesses, of which 78 per cent were SMEs, helping 1,595 disadvantaged people into employment. Additionally, £83,000 was reinvested in Wales—a commendable figure, but just 1 per cent more than 2013, so there is a spending gap there.

There are a couple of areas I would like to focus on today, and that is health and social care, refugees, and equal pay. The Welsh Government’s revised health and care standards noted in its report how services should provide high-quality, safe and reliable care, centred on the person. Further to this, our amendment today, our first one, calls on the Welsh Government

‘to clarify the progress made in relation to the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014, Part 2 Code of Practice, which requires local authorities to work in partnership with people to co-produce the solutions to meet their personal well-being outcomes.’

Cabinet Secretary, as we’ve seen in the news and in our own constituencies, this is not happening consistently across Wales. People able to return home from hospital are still forced to bedblock until a suitable care package is available. At present, we have 239 people in Wales who have been waiting more than three weeks to leave hospital, to go home—64 have been waiting over three months, and 25 over six. Equality of service, care provision, treatment, and joined-up working is not happening as it should, and I ask you how you are working to address this.

The Syrian resettlement programme noted in the report is intended to help resettle up to 20,000 Syrian refugees across the UK. In evidence taken by our committee—the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee—there has been much criticism from mainly everybody who has given us evidence that there is now a two-tier system in Wales. We’ve heard that whilst the support given to the resettled Syrian families is the gold standard with regard to housing, through the Welsh Refugee Council and Displaced People in Action, yet it does contrast so hugely with the support available—in some cases, none—for refugees from other countries who turn up at the Welsh Refugee Council every day. In response to my recent written Assembly question, you advised that you are aiming to achieve parity. I wonder if you would go into more detail today as to how this is being undertaken and how this will actually get through to the front line and onto the ground.

Now then, the Equal Pay Act came into force in 1970, and I’ve had cases that have gone on for nine years. In one case, one lady, begrudged her payment to bring her in line with law of £800, it took her nine years until my intervention to get her that money. In response to my raising this issue, the Cabinet Secretary for local government requested the WLGA to look at equal pay in more detail, and to put pressure on local authorities to settle. There are hundreds of cases of people—women—who have not received their equal pay for the work that they have carried out, and it’s wrong. Since 2011-12, councils have spent over £5.5 million of taxpayers’ money fighting these very valued front-line workers to settling their claims. This money is owed—it belongs to them—and they have missed out on this through inequality at its worst. Cabinet Secretary, under objectives 2 and 8 of the strategic equality plan, will you seek to look into this? The Welsh Government’s assessment of the strategic plan and equality objectives did not address this in the November 2016 report.

As a scrutinising and law-making body, we have an obligation to ensure that our local authorities and all public bodies don’t just produce the strategies, but they actually run the thread of equality across every single public service that’s delivered across Wales. Thank you.