Deputy Presiding Officer, I rise today to propose this motion in the spirit of utmost seriousness. It is no light matter to ask any parliament to express a lack of confidence in an appointed Minister. The threshold for making such a call is high, and rightly so. The Minister's party holds the highest number of Members in this place and, through arrangements with others, the First Minister has secured a majority. This gives him a mandate to govern and to choose his own Ministers.

However, faced with a systematic pattern of failures in our health service and the Minister's apparent unwillingness or inability either to hold senior managers to account for those failures or to take responsibility for them himself, we on this side of the Chamber felt we had no option but to table this motion today. At its heart is a matter of accountability, and in this context, it feels right to remind this Chamber where accountability for our national health service lies. Legislation passed in this place in 2009 restructured the service, removing market mechanisms and making the health service clearly accountable to the health Minister, and through her or him to this Assembly, and through this Assembly to the people. There is no ambiguity here. Health organisations are no longer, and have not been for many years, quasi-autonomous bodies.