Thank you for your statement. As chair of cross-party groups, including on disability and autism, I endorse your statement: there are pockets of good practice, but too many people are having to fight for the support and adjustments to services they need to enable them to lead an ordinary life.

You refer to working with the Minister for Housing and Regeneration. How, alongside her, will you be looking at the Equality and Human Rights Commission report, recently considered by the cross-party group on disability, which showed that only one in 22 Welsh authorities have a percentage target for accessible and affordable homes, and also at concern raised in my own North Wales casework that there's a disconnect between the needs of individuals, particularly on the autism spectrum, to live independently with appropriate support and local authority awareness and engagement with, often, social housing providers, such as First Choice Housing Association, which are working in my region, to plan for and deliver those? Because when they get it right, it can revolutionise the quality and independence of lives.

You refer to regional partnership boards. How do you refer to the concern that I know was expressed to you by Age Alliance Wales at the beginning of this year that the third sector representatives, including in this area, on those RPBs felt sidelined? This was a view or concern also expressed to me as recently as last Friday—when I opened with the chief constable of North Wales Police the Centre of Sign-Sight-Sound in north Wales—by regional partnership board representatives who attended as guests.

You refer to ensuring that people have a route into work. What engagement have you or your colleagues had with the new regional Department for Work and Pensions community partnership teams, which have been recruited externally, primarily from the third sector? I recently met people in my area who had previously worked in an autism charity and for Remploy, delivering a 12-month project supporting vulnerable people, upskilling Jobcentre Plus staff and building bridges between the public, private and third sectors.

You referred to the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act in the report that you're making the statement about, and, of course, this places a specific duty on local authorities to promote the involvement of people in the design and delivery of care and support services. The 'Part 2 Code of Practice (General Functions)' very much emphasises that, giving people clear and unambiguous rights and responsibilities. How, therefore, do you respond to the situation, for example, currently occurring in Wrexham where changes within Wrexham adult learning and disability services to the work opportunities project in Wrexham threaten the jobs of around 100 people with learning difficulties? I'm told by a number of families that Wrexham adult services are reviewing the projects, and as part of the review, running a consultation period, but the terms of the review and consultation are misleading, because they suggest that social services are listening to what parents are saying and will take this into account before a decision is made, when the reality is the decision has already been made. The officer, they said, claimed that the review was being carried out to meet the criteria of the social services and well-being Act, but they don't see how this can be the case.

Just two final groups, if I may mention—. The National Deaf Children's Society, as you know, has highlighted concern about the continuing attainment gap for deaf learners. As they say, deafness isn't a learning difficulty, but deaf learners are being disabled by the continuing inequity in outcome. They're 26.2 per cent less likely to attain an A to C grade in English, Welsh language, maths and science, in combination, than the general school population. Of course, this has been going on now for as long as I've been in this place. And also, to their concern, although deaf children struggle to have their social care needs acknowledged and understood, and the Care and Support (Assessment) (Wales) Regulations 2015 say:

'A local authority must ensure that any person carrying out an assessment...has the skills, knowledge and competence to carry out the assessment in question', in the case of a deaf child, too often assessments are not informed by specialist knowledge of deaf children's social care needs.

Finally, in relation to the event I hosted at lunchtime today for Epilepsy Wales, I hosted their annual Supporting People with Epilepsy in Wales event, and they asked me to raise these final points. One in five people with epilepsy have a learning difficulty. Those with complex epilepsy have very common learning difficulty comorbidity, but people with complex epilepsy are not being able to access treatment or services, such as, and particularly, the keto diet, even though this is a first-line treatment recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines, and also recommended by NICE for children with epilepsy after unsuccessfully trying two first-line drugs. They raise concern about awareness and support services. They raise concern about mental health support services. They raise concern about further investigations when a diagnosis is not obvious, including the need for genetic tests, which, too often, as we heard from the people present, were not being offered. 

I'll conclude on that point. I could, unfortunately, as you can imagine, go on all day on this subject, but I hope that you will give real consideration to these concerns, every one of which has been raised with me by non-politicians without party political interests.