Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I do move the amendments that I have tabled. Now, to listen to the Minister for Health and Social Services, you would imagine that everything's hunky-dory in our primary care services across Wales, but, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The primary care model for Wales is underpinned, really, by the GP services that many people, of course, enjoy as the front-line health service that they access, but, of course, we know that there is a significant crisis in GP recruitment at the moment that will undermine the delivery of the primary care model that the Welsh Government aspire to. Now, we've been warning about this GP crisis, along with the British Medical Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners, for many, many years. We were telling you to ramp up the number of training places almost a decade ago, and yet you have failed to do so up until recently. And even now, even with the ongoing shortages, we are still in a position where there are more individuals applying for those courses and eligible for those courses, in terms of being able to train in the GP specialism, yet you are knocking them back. This is in spite of the fact that we have got, according to the BMA, 24 GP practices that have closed across Wales, 29 that are managed by the health board and 85 that are at risk. Now, this situation cannot go on. You need to train more GPs and ramp up the opportunities for training as soon as possible.

On top of that, the Royal College of GPs, in their most recent survey, found that 23 per cent of GPs have said that they're unlikely to be working in general practice in five years' time. That's almost a quarter of the GP workforce. Seventy-two per cent tell us that they expect working in general practice to get worse over the next five years, and 42 per cent say that it's financially unsustainable to run their practices. So, I think that things are far less rosy than the Minister has tried to present today. We know also that managed practices, which are one of the things that the Government has highlighted as something that they want to see more of within the mix, are actually a lot more expensive—a third more expensive than the GP contractor role, which most people see as the traditional GPs in their local communities. Now, if you made the resources available that you're currently giving to those managed practices to the GP practices that are at risk, I think you'd find that many GP practices would no longer be at risk and would actually be managing quite well, thank you very much.

In terms of the applications—just in north Wales, by the way, we've seen closures of practices in Wrexham and elsewhere in north Wales, including in my own constituency, and yet there were 50 per cent more applicants than the number of individuals who were actually given training places on the GP specialism over the last year. So, 2017 figures suggested that there were 22 applicants, and yet just seven were offered places in Wrexham; 24 applicants in Bangor, yet just 12 were offered places—and this is in spite of the fact that we've got a dreadful GP shortage. So, I think that you need to look very carefully at those GP numbers, or else, frankly, your primary care plan is not going to work.

Now, on top of that, you're also making it less attractive to come and work in Wales and be a GP practitioner, because of the indemnity situation, which you barely touched on in your opening remarks. It's not surprising that you barely touched on it, of course, because what you're actually doing is top-slicing the income of GP practices, taking £11 million out of the cash available to support those practices in order to introduce a GP indemnity scheme, quite different than the current situation in England where they've had a significant uplift—[Interruption.]—where they've had a significant uplift—[Interruption.] You're not listening to me—where they've had a significant uplift in the income that is available to them in the same year that they had their indemnity insurance scheme. Bear in mind, it's not me saying this; this is the GPs themselves who contact me and contact you, and no doubt contact everybody else in this Chamber. Dr Philip Banfield, a representative of the BMA council in my own constituency, said it's

'having an immediate and catastrophic collapse of morale from GP colleagues in North Wales'.

Dr Conor Close, also a GP in my own constituency, says that the cut is a step too far for his surgery and that, I quote,

'Reducing the global sum is potentially the final straw in the long-term viability of the practice'.

You mentioned the situation with locum lists. As I understand it, this is going to add a new differential between Wales and England, and, in addition to that, you're saying that you're going to pay for the insurance for the locums. You're not going to top-slice their income, which is going to drag more and more people into locum work and away from the less expensive way of running things in their GP practices. So, we need a radically different approach. 

One final point, if I may, Madam Deputy Presiding Officer, and that is in respect of the share of investment as a total of the whole budget in the NHS. Wales has the lowest percentage of NHS budget invested in its primary care services versus any other part of the UK: 7.64 per cent, according to the statistics that I have, compared to 9.51 per cent in England being spent on primary care, 7.75 per cent in Scotland, and 9.51 per cent in Northern Ireland. Clearly, what you're doing is you're starving our primary care services at a time when they need significant investment, and I would urge you to take a different strategy forward, and I urge people to support the amendments that we have tabled.