I also support the introduction of this Bill and thank the Member for introducing it. We're all familiar with the horror stories. Babies have died because of NHS mismanagement. Thousands of young people have had their lives put on hold because metal health waiting lists have quadrupled. Patients have died waiting hours for an emergency ambulance to arrive. Lives have been hugely blighted for people waiting longer than they should for surgery, and cancers have grown while the capacity to diagnose and treat them in this country has shrunk. It's not the fault of the clinicians and the front-line staff that this has happened in Wales, but it is someone's fault, and if this Government is to be believed when they deny culpability for the increase in needless deaths and suffering caused by poor responses and outcomes, then it has to follow that it's the fault of certain NHS managers. 

Managing finite resource in an organisation that has to respond to what could be considered an uncontrollable demand is no doubt difficult, but brain surgery and complex cancer treatment is no doubt more difficult. Yet, the highly trained, registered and licensed brain surgeon is subject to the decisions of an unlicensed, unregistered NHS manager whose role requires no statutory qualification whatsoever. The decisions of some NHS managers have caused some serious problems, as I've discussed, yet we don't know of any NHS manager who has had so much as one day's pay docked, no-one sacked, no-one told to publicly account for their fatal failings. 

For years, I have supported calls for NHS managers to be registered or licensed in a similar fashion as those clinicians who are subject to the NHS managers' decisions. Too many times, we see that managers who fail in one public sector setting simply leave with a big pay-off and then pop up somewhere else in the public sector to wreak their incompetence on another group of unsuspecting taxpayers. Our own experience in this place shows that without a change in the rules of engagement we can't expect any significant improvement. For example, how many times have we in the opposition cornered the health Minister Vaughan Gething about the continued abomination that is Betsi Cadwaladr health board and asked him if anyone has been sacked for their huge failures or the ruining of people's lives, only to see him squirm and almost apologise for his own inability to do anything about it? 

This Bill stops short of a licensing system for NHS managers but it's a big step forward in the right direction. Many people would be surprised that there's not a professional body for an occupation as important as NHS management, yet there's a professional body for things like estate agents, advertisers and football coaches et cetera. An independent health inspectorate that's not full of political appointments is also vital. It's long past time that NHS managers should be held to account for the deaths and suffering that their bad decisions cause. It's clear that, since Vaughan Gething doesn't have the skills to solve the problems by himself, we now have to build the solutions into Welsh law. Thank you.