I'm delighted to participate in this debate, although I am not a member of the Finance Committee, but I welcome the report and the background work underpinning it, and we heard the arguments in the Government’s debate yesterday.

The funding system for social care—as the Chair has already outlined—is very complex indeed and it wouldn't be possible to come up with a more complex system even if you tried, as the Chair said. Having said that, it's not just a matter of money. As I said yesterday, we need to look in the round at the significant challenge of providing elder care and to try and view it from a positive perspective. We have an opportunity to create a national care system here, because I do think we need to change the structure. We need to be radical because it is going to take funding and we have to convince the public that there is a valuable system, based on a similar system to the health service. Everyone loves the health service of course, well, why not structure our care service so that it becomes more similar to our health service? Because there will be economic gains from that too, in providing jobs, salaries, training and so on and so forth, just like the workers in the health service, in those areas of Wales that find it difficult to provide jobs in the first place, and we need to develop a social care service as an economic development tool.

Because the system, as Nick Ramsay said, is not sustainable at the moment. We must have some way forward and not just think about how we're going to fund an already failing system. Because, at the moment, given the financial limitations on social services within our county councils, the threshold for people to receive care is increasing annually. I see this constantly: older people facing a number of physical and social challenges, they deserve care, but they don't reach that threshold—a threshold that increases every year, the threshold to receive care free of charge from the county, because the funding simply isn't available. I know what people are saying. They're saying, 'Well, pay for it then; pay for your care privately.' That’s what I hear, and we heard that yesterday. But, of course, that isn't an option for very many of our older people; they can't pay, and they go without any publicly provided care, and without any care, and the entire burden falls on the family, if you're fortunate enough to still have family nearby. That’s what we sometimes forget.

Why is this important? Because people are dying because of these cuts in funding and a lack of care provision. People are dying as a result of this. There was a review in The British Medical Journal in 2017 outlining the appalling situation of care in England, where social care funding has suffered a double blow. [Interruption.] Nick.