Of course, under these circumstances, staff in the NHS, as we’ve heard already, do excellent work under very difficult circumstances, which are complex, and they are so very busy, it’s very difficult to be able to convey how busy we are, often, to people who don’t work under those conditions.

So, there are three things to say about this debate on capacity in the NHS. Yes, there is a staff shortage, in the first place. If you name any profession working in the NHS, you need more of them—nurses and GPs. We’re short of about 400 GPs here in Wales. There are about 2,000 GPs in Wales and there should be about 2,500, and we have fewer doctors per capita in Wales than in the majority of other countries in Europe. Among our specialists in hospitals, about 40 per cent of consultant posts are vacant posts in our hospitals here in Wales.

So, of course, with such a busy system and a staff shortage, of course we’re going to have waiting lists, people having to work far too hard and so forth and so on. That’s why, as a party, we want to open a new medical school in Bangor. We have to train more doctors in the first place. We have to develop more of them, because we don’t produce enough doctors at present, and even if everyone who graduated these days stayed to work in Wales, we still wouldn't have enough doctors in Wales to serve our population.

Another element of the capacity is a shortage of beds, which has already been mentioned. There are several royal colleges that say this, and sometimes it’s not fashionable to talk about bed shortages, because over the last quarter of a century we’ve lost several thousand beds in our hospitals and in our care homes here in Wales. Why is that important? Well, with an ageing population, there is a range of people who are too ill to stay at home, even with whatever intensive package you have supporting them. But despite the fact that they’re sick and they’re so vulnerable, they’re not seriously ill enough to take a bed in an acute ward in a general hospital like Singleton or Morriston. There’s always a range of patients who fall between those two stools, and we can’t deal with them very well these days in the absence of beds in our community hospitals.

The final point that I’m going to make about capacity, of course, is the fact that the majority of capacity here is outside the health service. I’m talking here about social care. The social care situation in Wales, as in the rest of Britain, is very vulnerable at present because of significant underfunding over the years, which means that there is a very high threshold for you to be able to access services from social services. But, basically, if there is no social care, there won’t be a health service. That’s why, in the first place, we need to tackle social care. Time is short now, because we can’t offer any kind of support to a great deal of our population at the moment. That’s how serious the situation is. And that’s why, as a party, we’re looking to reconfigure, radically, the social care system by creating a national social care service that will operate like our health service, and alongside our health service. We have to do that, because, at present, we can’t offer care to our most vulnerable people who most need that care, and the resources are just not available. The time has passed to just take small measures at the margins; we need a radical solution, and a new national social care system that befits our country. Thank you.