Diolch, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’m very grateful to the Government for bringing forward this incredibly interesting topic, and I formally move the amendment tabled in the name of Paul Davies. We on this side of the Chamber support the general principles of this debate, and we’ve brought forward our amendment because we believe that social prescribing has no firm definition, a point brought forward by the NHS Confederation, for one, and, of course, they represent the health boards, so it’s very important that they should feel very comfortable with this going forward. And we feel that the King’s Fund have come up with a clear way of setting out in very simple terms what it means, and they refer to it as:

‘a means of enabling GPs, nurses and other primary care professionals to refer people to a range of local, non-clinical services.’

And, of course, the King’s Fund definition very much follows the direction of travel that we have here in Wales about asking people to start to take control of their own health, to participate, to be participants in their health agenda, and to be participants in their lives going forward. The King’s Fund very much identify that there is a range of social and economic factors that will allow patients, and need patients, to be treated in a holistic way. We definitely are not saying that the King’s Fund definition should be ‘the’ definition. We just want to see it as a benchmark—it’s what the English NHS have looked at; it’s what the Scottish NHS have looked at—because we need to have somewhere where we can start developing our own version of social prescribing, and I’m delighted that you’re going to be funding a trial to go forward on how social prescribing works.

You’ve already said about the positive impacts. I’m not going to rehearse all those arguments, but I know, as a committee, the Health and Social Care Committee are looking at loneliness and isolation in older people, and this is something that social prescribing might really be able to help. I know that my colleague Mark Isherwood will be talking in a while about co-production and about the need to bring on board third parties in order to deliver social prescribing. But I just particularly wanted to cleave to one of the points of your original motion where you say ‘considers’; you would like us to consider priorities for further promotion of social prescribing, and I would like to make two suggestions to you. How can the Welsh Government encourage a greater roll-out of social prescribing to young people? Throughout Wales, we have a significant number of young people who are in a very dark place: they’ve got eating disorders, they are self-harming. Some end up in a place so dark that their only alternative is to take their own lives. I represent a constituency that has seen a fair number of suicides from young people in the last couple of years. We know from evidence that, if you can engage people in areas like drama, exercise, art therapy, music therapy—very, very important ways of being able to perhaps bring someone back as they start that walk toward the cliff—if we can identify those people and get them before they’ve gone too far down that path, I would be really interested to see if we can start bringing this whole social prescribing agenda much closer to younger people as well, and not merely see it as reserved for either the elderly or for those in highly deprived areas.

I’d also wonder, as my second point, taking this forward: will the Welsh Government consider other professionals to be part of the social prescribing team—not just health professionals, but people such as school counsellors, or additional leaning needs co-ordinators? Because, as we all know, we’ve got enormous pressures on our mental health services. Children and adolescent mental health services are stuffed to the gunnels, they can’t turn around, and, if you have a school counsellor in a secondary school who’s talking to a young person who may be struggling with, for example, grief, because somebody they love desperately has died, that person should be able to socially prescribe a route for that young person to perhaps get to somewhere like Cruse or some other bereavement organisation. If they identify a child who’s starting to self-harm at about 12 years old, 13 years old, and those first tell-tale slashes across the tops of the arms appear, can they then pick up that child and refer them straightaway to some kind of therapy group, a counselling session, one of the third-sector providers that we need to engage with to make social prescribing a success? I just think that if we can perhaps broaden it out to other trained professionals, but in other fields, we might be able to alleviate some of the backlog or bottleneck that happens when you go into a doctor’s surgery, because they are already under immense pressure, and we can bring more people in in a truly productive way to actually start to produce the solution for people who are desperately in need. I’d be very grateful, Cabinet Secretary, if you would think about those two ideas and perhaps consider them as part of your motion here today. But we absolutely support this motion.