Diolch, Llywydd. When historians come to write the history of the last decade from the perspective of disabled people and how they've been treated by successive governments, I believe that we will be judged harshly. The consequences of the series of changes to social security that were first started by Lord Freud under the Tony Blair Government—yes, let's not forget that it was a Labour Government who created Atos—those changes were accelerated then under the coalition Government and they have been so devastating that they amount to one of the biggest violations of human rights in British history.

Now, in this Senedd and elsewhere, there have been enough of us calling out the UK Government on their behaviour, even if we've had limited influence as a result. So, it's doubly disappointing to see patterns of behaviour at Westminster creeping into the Welsh Government as the story of the independent living fund will tell us. Yesterday's announced changes to the way assessments are carried out are of course welcome, and no doubt the Minister will be responding to this debate by outlining those changes. I'd like to place on record our gratitude and congratulations to the campaigner Nathan Davies, whose campaign on this has been absolutely tireless. But the behaviour of this Government as a whole up until now has been one that demonstrates similarity to the approach that we've seen from the Tories in London.

When responsibility for managing the independent living fund was devolved to Wales, there were two main options that the then Welsh Government faced. On the one hand they could copy England and devolve the independent living fund to local authorities, and ask them to take responsibility for the care and support provided. Or, on the other hand, they could keep the fund and administer it, just as they did in Scotland and the north of Ireland. Now, my colleagues will elaborate further on the flawed decision-making process that has occurred here, but there is just one rhetorical question that summarises this whole debate: if you adopt a similar approach to the Tories, why would you expect a completely different result? And it's those predictable results that led to yesterday's announced changes. From the Minister's own statement:

'Considerable local variation is evident, with the percentage of former ILF recipients within a local authority whose hours of care have reduced ranging from 0% to 42%.'

What, of course, can't be measured is the level of anxiety and stress of having to go through constant reassessments, where your quality of life is on the line. Disabled people talk to each other. They know what happened with the introduction of the work capability assessment, and they know what happened when DLA was replaced with PIP. They know what happened in England to those people who were receiving the ILF. So, they knew that they faced assessments from staff working in an institutionally ableist public sector, assessments from organisations under massive financial pressure, and assessments with little protection against poor judgment. Yet, your Government still forced over 1,000 people to go through this and spent years resisting those campaigners and your own party activists, until the new Minister effectively overruled previous decisions.

Now, if the changes announced yesterday are implemented properly, we should, thankfully, see no disabled people at all lose out. But we will still have ended up with a system that has greater administrative costs and bureaucracy and imposed unnecessary stress and anxiety on some of the most vulnerable people in this country, and I believe you should apologise for that.