Can I thank the Minister for his statement: transforming social care in Wales—implementation of the Regulation and Inspection of Social Care (Wales) Act 2016, RISC? Can I first of all thank him for being willing to listen and to engage with various issues I've had with the regulatory mechanisms as they have been unfolding, and I'm grateful for his meetings and for his advice? 

In terms of the statement, obviously, this refers to the implementation of the regulation and inspection of social care, and it focuses a lot on the registration of care support workers and providers. Obviously, registration of care support workers is a very welcome step. Doctors are registered, nurses are registered, and it's only right that care support workers, increasingly involved in the most intimate of personal care, should also be registered. And, obviously, those processes are part of an obvious requirement in improving the outcomes in social care that we all want to see. 

But obviously the elephant in the room here is that you can't achieve all this whilst care support workers are low paid, still subject to casualisation, occasional zero-hours contracts, and that they don't have proper career paths that would lead to the equality of esteem that health professionals do have. Now, changing this requires significant increases in the wage and training bills at a time when local authorities can ill afford to do so. So, can you tell us, Minister, this afternoon, how the Government is putting its money behind this Act, and will you accept that the implementation of the spirit of the Act requires this injection of significant funding? Transforming social care demands no less.