Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 23 January 2018.
There are question marks over England's figures for a start. That doesn't diminish, of course, the pressures there have been on emergency services in Wales and I certainly don't seek to belittle that in any way, shape or form. But the question is this: should you divorce the issue of health and social care, as he's trying to do with his third question? The answer is, 'No, you cannot.' The two are integrated, the two are the same, they're integrated in terms of the service they seek to deliver to people and we have put money into that through the integrated care fund, making sure that people are able to leave hospital when they are able.
What England did was to try to spend money on health and starve social care of money, effectively taking away from social care and putting into health, and now England is reaping the whirlwind of that. We always took the view that health and social care had to be seen in the round and that one was strongly linked to the other.
If we look, for example, just beyond that to the Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Bill; that looks at bringing together education and health provision for young people as well. So, we've made sure, when it comes to spending, that spending in Wales is higher per head than in England on health and on social care to make sure that we don't let our people down just like the Government has done in England.