I mentioned a few moments ago that there had been this joint report, which the healthcare inspectorate and the care inspectorate had produced. Some of the findings in that report were very, very concerning. The report found that there was a disparity and a variation in the consistency and the availability of services provided by community mental health teams across Wales, and it's some of those issues that I want to just focus on for a few moments, if I can.

One of the problems that was identified was that there was a difficulty in the referral system—that it was pretty inconsistent, and that not everybody was able to access services in a timely fashion when they needed to be able to access them. It was clear from the report that general practitioners were not always clear on how to refer directly into their community mental health teams and very often were referring to hospital teams instead.

The report said that there was a need for a single point of access, from a referral point of view, so that people knew exactly where to present their patients when they were in need of care and support. Of course, this chimes very well with some of the findings and recommendations that we've seen from Assembly committees that have looked into our mental health services as well. We remember that it wasn't that long ago that we debated the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee's report on suicide prevention, which also highlighted this issue of needing to have some clear pathways and some timely access to support when it was required.

The report found also that many people find difficulties in accessing community mental health teams, particularly during a crisis. While there were some parts of Wales where people were getting immediate support, in other parts of Wales there were people who were struggling to access services, particularly GP out-of-hours services. Of course, a number of people were reporting that they had to make a number of separate presentations in an emergency department before they were getting access to the sort of crisis support that they needed.

I think it was just two fifths of those who were surveyed as part of that work who said that when they contacted their mental health teams—their community mental health teams—during a crisis, only two thirds were actually getting the help that they needed. That's why we have made one of our calls in this debate the need for crisis teams to be available 24/7—around the clock—in all our major emergency departments across Wales, so that the support is there when it's needed in a crisis. We need that uniform access and pathway to that crisis support.

It's very difficult to understand precisely what the level of demand is for community mental health teams, because, of course, there's no data currently published by the Welsh Government in relation to them. Fortunately, Mind Cymru have done some work on this, through freedom of information requests. It suggests that between 2014-15 and 2017-18, referrals into community mental health teams have grown by around 18 per cent, and that is over 4,000 additional referrals going into those teams, currently standing—or in 2017-18—at 26,711 referrals in a year. Now, that is less than the actual number of referrals across Wales, because, unfortunately, there's one health board that was unable to give any information about the number of referrals that were going into their community mental health teams, and, unfortunately, that's the only health board that was in special measures—the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board.

We know that Betsi is in special measures because of concerns around its delivery of mental health services, so I think it's particularly troubling that that is the one health board that doesn't seem to be able to have a grasp on the total number of referrals, because, of course, you need to know what the referrals are in order that you can plan to meet the demand that's presenting itself to those teams, so that you can manage people's care—remember, these are very vulnerable people—in an effective and safe way. So, I think it is concerning that there is a serious lack of data, and that's one of the reasons we will be supporting the Plaid Cymru amendments that have come forward, one of which refers, of course, to the need to publish data on a regular basis. 

Now, we talk a lot in this Chamber about the need for parity between mental and physical health services, and I think it's absolutely right that we should have equality between those two services, to make sure that we are measuring performance against similar suites of targets. But it's clear that here in Wales there are too many people at the moment waiting for far too long for access to talking therapies. I know it's a matter of concern to people in all political parties here, including members of the Government. And those waits have been highlighted in the HIW and care inspectorate report, and it can be anything up to two years. Now, when people are referred to secondary care services for support, they need that support in a timely manner, and waiting, frankly, for two years before they get access to the treatment that they need is clearly not good enough. 

Now, there are targets that the Welsh Government has for both local primary mental health support services and, indeed, for community mental health teams and secondary services to meet, but what is strange is that, usually, if you're in a level of more severe need, you would expect that you would need a quicker intervention, so the target should effectively be shorter. That's not the case in terms of the targets that the NHS in Wales is currently operating to in respect of mental health services, which I think is something that we need to work to address. 

For example, local primary mental health support services, which are there to support those with mild to moderate or very stable, severe enduring mental health needs have a target of 28 days from presenting themselves to a primary care team to the date on which they are assessed. That is the target period—they've got to be assessed within 28 days. And then there's another target that there is 28 days from the date of that assessment until they must receive treatment. Truncated—56 days being the maximum that someone should have to wait from the time that they are referred to the time that they receive treatment. 

But for secondary care services, including access to community mental health teams—and these are people with more severe and more complex mental health needs—the target is 26 weeks from assessment to treatment—not from referral to treatment, but from assessment to treatment. Now, that, to me, clearly suggests that there's a problem in the system somewhere in terms of what the level of priority ought to be. Now, I appreciate there are going to be challenges in being able to bring that target time down, but it is concerning that we're not there at the moment.  

And, of course, performance against these targets is not published routinely. I'm assuming it's measured somewhere by the Government, but we don't have the data to be able to demonstrate whether the NHS in Wales is meeting these targets, and I think that we need to do something about that. There was a clear commitment in the 'Together for Mental Health' delivery plan, published for 2012-16, that said that we would have a mental health core data set by December 2014. We don't have that yet, and, in fact, I think it's being kicked down the road to 2022, which is clearly not ambitious enough. Neither have we seen annual reports for quite some time, in terms of the delivery of the Together for Mental Health programme. That was a commitment that was made—that we would have annual reports—but we haven't had them. 

So, clearly, things need to change. We very much hope that the Assembly will support the motion before us, and we will accept those amendments that I referred to earlier. Thank you.