6. What recent discussions has the Minister had with the Minister and Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services about the funding of social care? OAQ53488

The funding of social care is a key focus of the inter-ministerial group on paying for social care, of which the Minister and Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services and I are members, alongside the Minister for Housing and Local Government. It last met on 7 February, and will convene again next week.

I'm very grateful to you for your answer, Minister. Can you give us some indications of the timescale under which that group is expected to report? Because I'm certainly being told that we are, in some parts of Wales, facing a crisis in social care, one of the major issues being recruitment of staff. Of course, there's a Brexit element to that, but, in the context of this question today, one of the other major issues is the lack of parity of pay as well as parity of esteem between those who do identical jobs in the health service and those who do exactly the same roles in the care sector, where the work is less secure, where the terms and conditions are less favourable. And I'm constantly being told by care providers that they are training staff and then losing them to the NHS because the conditions are so much better there.

Is the working group that you've just mentioned addressing those parity of pay issues? If it isn't doing so at the moment, can I ask you to commit to doing so? Because, in the end, the quality of our care services, as of our health services, is entirely dependent on the people that provide them. Everything else you can do, but, unless you get the people right, you really can't provide the service that people need, particularly in terms of caring for the elderly. If you've got a constant turnover of staff, the effect that has on quality of care and the well-being, the emotional well-being, of individuals is devastating.

So, can I ask both for a timescale and that the working group does address those issues? We hear a lot about parity of esteem between health and care, but we say in Welsh 'diwedd y gân yw'r geiniog'—at the end of the song is the penny, and I don't think that people working in care care quite so much as about esteem as they do about what's in their pay packet.

Thank you very much for raising that. The main focus of the inter-ministerial group is very much on the challenge of paying for care, and that would be looking at how care is paid for in the future, very much in the context of the Holtham report on paying for care and the Finance Committee's report on the cost of caring for an ageing population. That said, however, there are a few streams of work involved, one of which is purely financial; the other really is about what the offer is.

So, if we are asking people in future to pay, potentially through a social care levy—that's one of the ideas that Gerry Holtham put forward, but it's not the only one, but, nonetheless, people will need to know what the offer is, what the deal will be for them. I think part of that conversation certainly is about the quality and the qualifications of the staff who would be looking after them in future. So, we are at the start of a journey on this particular piece of work. It is a wide-ranging piece of work. I would expect that it would be informing all of our thoughts as we move towards the next election in terms of what we might be offering to people. I'd be more than happy to have a further meeting with you to talk about what we've been learning so far through our discussions and the kind of big questions that we are exploring.

Neil McEvoy is not here to ask question 7 [OAQ53494]. Question 8, therefore, Jenny Rathbone.