Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:04 pm on 26 June 2018.
You'd expect nothing less from Julie Morgan than a comprehensive overview of the issues. She's worked tirelessly in this regard all her life, I think, actually, it's fair to say, in a proud family tradition.
On the health issues, we have gone to some trouble to make sure that the plan details how we intend to narrow the gap in health outcomes between Gypsies, Roma, Travellers and the wider population, and that includes both physical and mental health. Therefore, all of the actions in this section will be undertaken with due consideration to both of those aspects, as that was always raised with me in some of the meetings that we've attended together.
There's a specific action within this section that covers the monitoring of local health board completion of health needs assessments, and that these results are then properly fed into the service planning, and I mentioned before about recording the ethnicity in order to be able to track the data, so that we do continue to have good data about whether it's working, and we'll get the required evidence in responding to health needs, including mental health, and demonstrate where the additional action is needed as a result of the gathering of that. We also want to make sure that we have it as central to the plan when we consult the community to make sure that that recording is working properly and to their benefit, so that's a really big part of it.
In terms of the broadband, I'm delighted to say that we are looking now to see whether we can have good broadband on all of the local authority sites. The young woman, who I was very impressed by, Deputy Presiding Officer, was very vehement to me that, if we want to have flexible arrangements on sites so that people can log in and out of Hwb for education or My Health Online and so on, it was hopeless if the broadband was inadequate. So, I very much took that on board, and we're going to some efforts now to make sure that all of our sites map out where they are with that, and make sure that the broadband is properly extended to cover that.
The other issue is to make sure that we have the right connections with our Travelling Ahead project to contact all of the people who are in our communities, including the ones who happen to be in settled accommodation at this time. I was very moved by one of the families that offered me an enormous amount of hospitality, about her distress at having to be in 'bricks and mortar', as she calls it, while her daughter was at university, and her desperation to get back out of that as soon as possible. The strength of her feeling was plain. So, we need to make sure that we take into account all of those issues, and I'm very, very determined to do so.
And, in terms of the learner support, as I said, I wanted to pay tribute to that. We will be working very hard with local authorities to ensure that the additional money we've given them so far goes into the right places, and to understand how they're doing the needs assessments. Because I understand as well from the consultations that we've undertaken that some of the services appear to be under threat, and I don't really see why that should be happening. So, we're going to be looking very carefully to make sure that it doesn't happen, because we are funding that.