Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:30 pm on 31 January 2018.
You're absolutely right, Cabinet Secretary, we can't force people to take part in consultations. But picking up from the point that David Rees made, there are an enormous number of really good ways of engaging people at a grass-roots level and really taking the temperature of proposed changes. Organisations such as INVOLVE, who run consultations in England—they work very hard with local authorities and health boards, they run fun days, there's all sorts of new ways of actually getting to the hard to reach, rather than the very stale paper-based, or if you're lucky and get broadband, computer-based consultations that we have in a very, very small window, almost inevitably run over a Christmas or a summer holiday. I would like to ask you to have a good look at all the alternatives we can to reach them.
But, above all, the central point of my question is: do you think it is still appropriate, given the parliamentary review, that we actually have consultations now run by health boards, or should they be health and social care, given the fact that we're looking for such an integrated and seamless way of going forward? Because anything that health decide to do will have an enormous impact on local authorities, and on the provision of social care, and the provision of housing. And if we're trying to get towards this more holistic way of putting the person at the centre of their health needs, ongoing, then we really should look at it in the round. A lot of these consultations are all about the health side, and don't really bring in the other half of the very important provision that we should be providing.