Diolch yn fawr, Dirprwy Lywydd, and I move the motion.

Members, I suppose the easiest way to start this is to just say that it's Carers Week, and let's have a debate about carers. This awareness raising is very valuable, and it's useful to have a point, I think, at which to mark our appreciation. But I suspect that what most of the 370,000 unpaid carers would like us to do is show that appreciation by acting rather than just talking about it. 

Three hundred and seventy thousand people is over 11 per cent of the population. It's just about twice the number who work in our health services, including all the dentists and administrative staff, and scientists and doctors and nurses and health visitors, the paramedics, the technical staff, the midwives and the therapists. They provide over £8 billion-worth of unpaid care, and that's the equivalent of over half the Welsh Government's budget. I think that is one hell of a 'thank you' that this nation owes its unpaid carers.

I hope that this debate will prove a profitable and open-minded exchange of ideas, speaking directly to those things that matter to carers themselves, and perhaps not getting too hung up on structural changes without a clearer explanation of cause and effect. But I am pleased to see that it has attracted a number of amendments that I'll come to in due course.

But I'd like to start with the one that I think has really missed the mark on good faith carers, and that is the Government amendment—No. 1. It's not the substance of the amendment, which simply sets out the Government's stall, which is fine, but the fact that it deletes point 4 of the original motion—the very point that holds you, Minister, to account on the most valuable, indeed statutory, promises that you've made to carers so far. You could've come, Minister, to this Chamber and told us in good faith that of course you'd publish figures on how many carers' needs have been assessed and then met under the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014, and you could've told us, quite reasonably, that, with 370,000 carers in Wales, this number of people couldn't conceivably have been reached since 2014, but perhaps given us an indication of how local authorities were recruiting for the work, or maybe outsourcing the work—not just assessing and meeting the needs of carers, but identifying new carers for which you also have a statutory responsibility. You could've told us, maybe, that it was even difficult to find assessors, or even pay them, and I think, to a degree, we would've understood. But to refuse to be scrutinised is shameful. Have you really been put out so much by Carers Wales's 'track the Act' findings last September, which said that there was, and I quote, 'little evidence' of the first full year of the Act improving the lives of carers?