I, too, welcome the statement and, indeed, the report, which is a mine of information, which I’m sure we will, after full consideration, find is useful in many respects.

I fully accept what the health Secretary says about targets, but I think we ought to acknowledge that, without the Government’s failure so spectacularly to meet the targets that it set itself, we’re unlikely to have had this report in the first place. We must continue to have targets, but, of course, those targets must be meaningful targets. That is a point that is incontestable, and we certainly don't need targets that are misleading. Nevertheless, I was somewhat troubled by the page in the report—page 23—which really sets out to pooh-pooh targets, I think, if you look at it with some care. It says, for example:

'The value of a response time as a measure of the impact and quality of ambulance service care is… questionable',

'if health services are preoccupied with hitting targets then the actual journey an individual patient experiences becomes secondary', and various other expressions of that kind. I think that the public at large, of course, do want to have ambulance services delivered as quickly as possible, and the failure to do so causes inevitable stress, and that stress impacts, of course, upon ambulance staff themselves, who are trying to give the best possible service to the public.

Much of this is perhaps beyond even the health Secretary’s control. We all know about the needs and means problems of the health service and the excess of demand over supply, which will probably always be there, but I would like the health Secretary to give us an assurance that, because the Government has consistently failed to meet many targets, and has failed to meet them by sometimes very large measures, which are exemplified and illustrated in the report itself—and, indeed, the health Secretary in his own statement says that the median response time for amber calls has increased by an average of seven minutes during the review period itself—. This is all very unwelcome news, but the existence of targets is essential if they're properly used, not just as a stick to beat management with, but as a tool to improve the service, and are essential to achieving the result that everybody in this place wants, which is better healthcare for as many people as possible. And, if we are able to square that particular circle, obviously, that’s going to impact upon sickness rates of staff as well. I think the 7 per cent staff sickness rate is an indictment, in a sense, not necessarily of the Government, but of the inability of the country actually to have a proper debate about the amount of money that ought to be put into the health service and the way in which that can be done to produce the most effective results. But, ultimately, we're all trying to achieve the same objective, but we've got to have the right information upon which to make the necessary political decisions about allocating resources and how to manage them, which are vital to a successful health service in Wales.