I want to focus, if I may, my comments on the plight of veterans' mental health services. It's an issue that is frequently raised in the cross-party group on the armed forces and cadets, and it's something that we actually visited earlier this week as well in our cross-party group meeting, at which Angela Burns was present. We all know that veterans don't just face stresses on their mental health from actually being in conflict and war zones, but they can actually face pressures during the transition back into civilian life post their service. So, it's really very essential that we have a health and social care system that meets their particular needs, because of course we know that if we don't meet their needs, then there could be a cycle of decline, which is significant and which actually costs the taxpayer much more money to resolve than had these issues been nipped in the bud in the first place: family breakdown, criminal justice system episodes, and—unfortunately, as is the case with the farming community, as we've also heard—people deciding to end their own lives.

Now, the Welsh Government, I have to say, has to be commended for the establishment of Veterans' NHS Wales. It's something that we on these benches have continuously supported and championed over the years. We know that almost 3,000 veterans have used the service since it was established in 2010, and that the numbers of individuals accessing the service have increased year on year since it was started. Just last week, I visited the Cardiff and Vale hub of the service to meet with Dr Neil Kitchener, who of course supervises the service across Wales, and I saw, there, the tremendous work that's been going on with their 3MDR research, which is an immersive technology that gets veterans to confront the trauma that they have experienced in the past, in the hope that it will help to resolve that trauma and get them through it, and I know that the Cabinet Secretary has also been to visit—tremendous research, cutting-edge research, which is taking place here in Wales, and I want to trumpet that fact, because it's something we can all be very proud of. 

However, there are pressures within the Veterans' NHS Wales service that need to be addressed. One of the big problems that they've had in recent years is capacity, and the Cabinet Secretary is aware that there are variable waiting times across Wales for access to the service. In some places, the wait can be as short as eight weeks, which is obviously very, very good. In other places, it can be as long as 38 weeks, which is clearly unacceptable, at the moment. And, of course, those pressures have been relieved, to a certain extent, with an additional investment of £100,000, which recently came through from the Welsh Government, but I'm afraid it's insufficient still to meet the scale of the demand that's out there. So, the service itself reckons that it needs an additional £250,000 to provide peer mentoring support, which can be embedded as part of the service, which was traditionally there as a result of the Change Step service, which was a Wales-wide service, which was being run by CAIS, which is a charity that operates from my own constituency. And the peer mentoring support services at the moment are actually funded partly by Help for Heroes and partly, to their credit, by the Betsi Cadwaladr University Local Health Board, which complements the Veterans' NHS Wales therapist service, which is available.

So, for just £0.25 million per year, which is small beer in terms of the overall Wales-wide NHS budget, we can make a real difference to these veterans, and I do believe, Cabinet Secretary, that it's your will that we have the best service that we can possibly have for those veterans here in Wales, so I would sincerely ask that you review the funding arrangements for Veterans' NHS Wales to see whether you might be able to consider this £250,000, in addition to the resources that you've already pledged, so that that service can be a gold-standard service in a way that no other part of the UK actually has.

I just want to close with a plug for Veterans Shed services as well. The very first veterans' shed—. People will be familiar with Men's Sheds services, but the very first veterans' shed was actually established in my own constituency in Llanddulas, and I'm very proud of that fact. They also are doing, at a very much lower level, but they're building resilience in the veteran community when they are facing challenges after returning to civilian life. So, I want to plug them and Martin Margerison, the gentleman who started that in my own constituency. I feel that we need more of those veterans' sheds across Wales, and I want to commend the Government for the work it's doing on NHS veterans, but I do think that we need to more.