I thank you for that question, and I agree that carers play an absolutely central role in the whole system of social care in Wales, and you’ll be aware that we’re refreshing our carers strategy at the moment. Part of that is looking at young carers, older carers, carers of older people—but also looking to ensure that carers can actually have a life outside caring as well, because we know how important that is. And our carers strategy will be led by the key things that carers are telling us are important to them. When talking about the intermediate care fund, I prefer to talk about it and think about it as an integrated care fund, which is handy because it doesn’t require any changing of the ICF letters, but it is very much integrated in the sense that it is working, in many places, closely with housing, for example, to ensure that we have step-up, step-down facilities available within the extra-care setting: so, places where people can find a residential placement that will change with their needs over time. So, people with early dementia might be able to go to an extra-care setting, where they won’t have to move over time, but the support available to them in that place can change with them, and I think that that’s an important way in terms of improving the care that people receive.

I recently was at the launch of the Health and Care Research Wales project, which took place in Cardiff, and that’s about bringing universities together with the social care sector itself, because we have such expertise within the social care sector in terms of the practitioners and the social workers and so on, but I don’t think that, so far, we’ve been making the most of that expertise and of those experiences and the potential for research there. So, again, this a new and exciting innovation in terms of being able to understand very well what’s happening in social care, looking at barriers and opportunities and so on, and listening to people who actually do the work on the front line.