I welcome the opportunity to welcome this statement and also to wish a happy birthday to our national health service at 70 years of age. May I start by paying tribute to Aneurin Bevan and Dr Julian Tudor Hart, who passed away in the past few days, and whom I met on a number of occasions as a fellow GP in the South Wales Valleys? But, essentially, we are celebrating the survival of a vision of free treatment based on need alone and a health service funded from general taxation—everyone, therefore, sharing and paying for the risk. It is something quite unique across most of the world, namely that all of these people share the risk as well as contributing towards payment. And the health service, therefore, is dealing with real health inequalities, because having to pay for treatment is always going to make things worse in terms of health inequalities, because some people won’t be able to afford treatment.

Now, I’ve been a doctor for 38 years. Now, that’s over half the existence of the NHS, and I’m still very proud to still be a practising doctor working for the NHS. That is a source of great pride to me, I have to admit, because some people who come to see me as patients were children when I started working as a GP, and now they are grandmothers and grandfathers themselves, and it is an honour to be an unbroken line within the lives of very many people in Wales.

We can’t overemphasise the relief of taking money out of the equation—taking money out of the consultation, if you like. Of course, prescription charges were introduced in 1951, and Aneurin Bevan left the Cabinet as a result of that. And, of course, the Government here scrapped prescription charges some 11 years ago. With the abolition of prescription charges, we truly can focus on the best treatments, because having to pay for prescriptions in England means that you pay over £8 for every item on your prescription. Therefore, we don’t have to under-treat our patients here in Wales because we as doctors may be concerned about the cost to the patient. We don’t have to change treatments and we don’t have to fail to prescribe something because of the cost here in Wales, and that is very much in contrast to the situation over the border in England.

We would be staggered, therefore, if we were to have to save money, or sell our home, or pay a huge price for health services—can you imagine such a situation? In many nations today, you have to save money for an operation, for example; well, that isn’t the case with the NHS. But, surprisingly, today in Wales, and in the UK, that is the situation with social care. People are expected to save up. They are expected, on occasion, to sell their homes. They are expected to pay a huge amount for support and social care today. I would say, as we celebrate a free NHS, based entirely on patient need, funded from general taxation, that we need the same solution for social care, and that that should be provided free of charge, on the basis of a national social care service. Would you agree?