We’ve recently heard a great deal of talk, and questions asked of the Government in this Chamber, about mental health care for young people. Waiting lists and waiting times are one important measure of the performance. To remind you, between 2013 and 2015 there was a huge increase in waiting times, particularly for those waiting over 16 weeks or four months. We were in a situation where almost half of those people waiting had to wait longer than four months. There was some improvement then, but by February 2017, the last month of data that we have available for comparison, the waiting times still hadn’t returned to the level of the summer of 2013, so the decline is very clear.

But the Government’s response time and time again, unfortunately, was to deny there was a problem. On many occasions, the First Minister claimed that the real problem was that there were too many people on the waiting list that didn’t need to be there. And in March of last year, what we saw was the statistics changing overnight. The number of people on the list recorded as being waiting for a CAMHS appointment went down 74 per cent, as non-CAMHS routes were withdrawn—that was over 1,700 children and young people. Our amendment today reflects the fact that we don’t know what happened to those children; the CAMHS data is the only performance data available.

Inevitably, a change in the way that waiting times were measured led the Government to tell us that the waiting times were improved because the data did demonstrate a great improvement: 86.7 per cent of cases were being seen within four weeks. A huge increase on the 35.2 per cent in the previous month. But, of course, what’s happened here is a change in the way things are recorded, and we can’t make real comparisons, and we don’t know what happened to that other 74 per cent of children that we used to record.

The First Minister wrote to Leanne Wood when we raised this issue in November, confirming that our figures were accurate: 74 per cent of the other cases were either children who would now be seen by specialist services for children with neurodevelopmental problems, which were developed in 2016-2017, or lesser cases that had been dealt with by primary care mental health services at a local level, which had been wrongly included in the previous CAMHS figures. But, of course, we don’t have data for the children who need those services.

We do accept that some children and young people had needed treatment for neurodevelopmental issues, rather than CAMHS. We also know that the threshold for CAMHS has been far too high. That was noted by the Children, Young People and Education Committee inquiry in 2014. The Wales Audit Office also noted that there was a problem of treatment for young people being stopped if an appointment was missed, and that was an issue that had an impact on the figures.

But I am a long way from being convinced that the only problem with CAMHS was there were too many children and young people there who didn’t need to be there. We know that it’s a capacity issue, an issue of a shortage of specialist services, and a failure to take the issue seriously enough. A lack of data is a problem that means that we can’t measure and assess and put pressure on the Government to take the steps that our young people need. We can’t accept the status quo of not knowing how the NHS is performing when it comes to looking after some of our most vulnerable people.