Minister, I’d like to thank you for your statement today. I also welcome the publication of the population assessments, although I am extremely puzzled as to how these health boards and other organisations managed to make strategic plans in the past without such a thing. I am very surprised to hear that it took so long to deliver them, because I would have thought that a key component of understanding what services you need to deliver is to know what the population is that you are serving.

Also, just a little bit further on from that, you talk about the fact of the regional boards and that they are to use this as part of the process to consider their strategic involvement. Can you just confirm whether or not the Welsh ambulance service trust is part of that proposal as well, because, of course, they are an integral part of providing joined-up services for health and social care?

You talk, Minister, of the integrated care fund, and money is always welcome, there is no doubt about it, however, during the scrutiny of the Welsh Government’s budget, it’s very clear that some health boards are stating that cost drivers and investments in key areas are not being mitigated by the required level of savings that they need to make. So, my question to you is: is this enough? What fallback position do you have, or what are you expecting the health boards and integrated service providers to do in order to make sure that there is enough money within these pools to go forward and provide the services that they need in their particular area? As I say, this is coming through loud and clear in the health committee scrutiny of the Welsh Government budget.

What metrics will you be using when you look at your large-scale review of the ICF? Have you actually given thought to how that will—or have your officials given thought to how that will be judged? What benchmarks will you be using? It is a question I raised with the Cabinet Secretary earlier on a previous statement. It’s all very well having these reviews, but you must have a framework within which you know that those reviews can work, and work well.

Your statement on integration and partnership working in health and social care today makes no mention of the integration of workforce planning. Will you be looking at that? Will you be asking those regional boards to look at that as part of their work process, going forward? Because there’s no point in having, for example, all the doctors and nurses in the world that we may wish—if only we were in that position—to then find we don’t have enough social workers to get people back out into their homes, et cetera.

You also don’t talk about how we can use these boards to foster a culture of innovation. I think what’s becoming very, very clear in both the parliamentary review and in leading evidence that’s being put forward by King’s Fund, et cetera, is that we need to have the ability to enable little green shoots of innovation to gather strength, to make these changes, to make sure that this integration works well. We have to bring on board the private sector into a public sector space. I would be very interested to know how you’re going to make that work and how you are going to be able to manage the not unnatural tension between big public sector monoliths, if you like, and the private care sector and, of course, our local authorities, which, as we already know, are very sad local authorities, having just received their budgets, and are wondering how they are going to be able to perform their part of this deal. Thank you.