It's been a deeply upsetting week for anyone who has read or been involved with the royal college's review of maternity services in Cwm Taf. The testimonies of the mothers whose babies died cannot but move any of us, and the way they've been treated is enough to make anyone angry. Now, I asked the question last week about whether this would have happened in another area—say, for example, a hospital service in a wealthier catchment area, where the patients would be more likely to be middle class. Would we see a report highlighting dismissive attitudes and a failure to apologise, and responses that were formulaic and seemed to be more interested in defending the reputation of individuals and the health board in a wealthier area? I very much doubt it. And this isn't a controversial point; it forms part of the inverse care law that the Minister himself has acknowledged in plenty of other circumstances. The dismissive tone in which these concerns were dismissed by the Minister last week doesn't inspire confidence in me that things will be put right. After all, the crux of the problem here is that people, mainly working-class women, have been dismissed, and here was the health Minister doing that all over again. But holding the Minister to account does not mean that those responsible at the health board should also not be held to account—of course they should—and right up until last week, there were questions over their actions.

In October last year, before the external review was commissioned, a Cwm Taf spokesperson told the media that their internal review was a routine exercise about whether things should be done differently. At the very same time, the health board were in possession of an internal report that said that things were far worse. Where is the transparency here? Hiding that report was misleading us: evidence that the board is more interested in defending its reputation than correcting the problems within the service. It remains a grave injustice, in my view, that doctors, nurses and midwives can be struck off and face criminal investigation—rightly, of course—for failures in patient care, whereas not a single manager, to our knowledge, has ever faced equivalent sanctions. That is not right and it's symptomatic of the class-based culture that infects public life. The chief executives of our health boards are paid substantially more than the First Minister, and they face no equivalent accountability, whereas we all know, if a low-paid or a low-grade worker did something of even a quarter of this magnitude in their workplace, there would be a very, very different result.

The Minister himself has not acknowledged that he runs the health service in Wales. He is responsible; the buck is meant to stop with him, but to date, this has meant very little. But here today, at least, we can send a message that Ministers can be struck off. This is, after all, an issue of more magnitude than recent sackings in Westminster. Liam Fox resigned for inviting an ex-special adviser abroad to meetings. Amber Rudd misled a committee, and Gavin Williamson allegedly leaked confidential information. Now, I would argue that service failures that led to that damning report last week are much more serious than the matters that those Westminster Ministers resigned over.

Let's contrast the behaviour of the health Minister here over the past week with that of the former health minister in Tunisia. In March of this year, 11 babies tragically died in a hospital in Tunis, following an infection outbreak attributed to poor practices on the ward. The health minister in Tunisia looked at his conscience, took responsibility and resigned, despite only having been in the post for four months. It's time that we applied those standards of accountability and responsibility here. I think it definitely is.