I thank the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee for their report on endoscopy services. As I, and many others, have highlighted, pressures on diagnostic services in Wales are impeding our ability to improve cancer survival rates. Bowel cancer is the second biggest cancer killer in Wales. Around 17 people die of bowel cancer each week. We have lost two of our own to this horrible disease. 

As with every cancer, early diagnosis is key to long-term survival. When diagnosed at stage 1, 90 per cent of bowel cancer patients survive. This drops to fewer than one in 10 when diagnosed at stage 4. Bowel screening is the best way to ensure early diagnosis, yet less than 10 per cent of bowel cancers are picked up by the Wales bowel screening programme.

Earlier this month, the FIT test fully replaced the old, less accurate blood test for bowel screening for anyone aged between 60 and 74. Unfortunately, the FIT test will be conducted at a much lower sensitivity due to capacity issues in endoscopy services. We will continue to miss many cancers because we don't have the workforce. Yet again, a lack of strategic workforce planning over the past couple of decades has left our NHS unable to cope with future pressures. We have to degrade our ability to detect cancer because we don't have the workforce to conduct further tests. 

The UK national screening committee believes that everyone over the age of 50 should be screened for bowel cancer in order to combat the 16,000 annual deaths due to this terrible disease. Once again, we have not taken up this recommendation due to capacity issues. This is not due to a shortage of money; it's due to a lack of forward planning and an utter failure of successive Governments to implement strategic workforce planning.

I welcome the committee's recommendation and calls for a national endoscopy action plan. I'm pleased that the Minister has accepted the committee's recommendations and that he has made it clear that the 60 per cent uptake threshold is a minimum requirement and not a target. We have to ensure uptake closer to 100 per cent, but in order to do so, we must ensure that we have sufficient capacity now to cope with the anticipated massive increase in the over-50 age bracket.

This will require strategic planning at a Welsh and UK level. I urge the Minister and Health Education and Improvement Wales to work closely with the other home nations, as well as the UK Government, to ensure that we have enough well-trained staff across our diagnostic services. We can beat this terrible disease by ensuring that everyone at risk is screened regularly and made aware of the early signs of bowel cancer. Only then can we ensure that other families don't have to go through what Sam and Steffan's families had to. Diolch yn fawr.