Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer, and thank you, Janet Finch-Saunders, for bringing this debate to the Chamber tonight. I think it’s a great opportunity to recognise the importance of care homes and the social care sector as a whole, and I’m really pleased that Janet has been able to highlight some of the really good work that is done in the care sector, because I think it is behoven on us to boost that sector as much as we can. So, I’m very pleased to be able to respond to this debate tonight, because it’s absolutely clear that the care homes make a vital contribution to the lives of people who need care and support in Wales. It also allows me to share with you some of the areas that this Government and our partners are focusing on to ensure the social care sector is supported effectively and is in the best possible position to care for itself.

Obviously, the sector does not and cannot operate and thrive in isolation. We must each play our part at national, local and, indeed, at service-provider level, and we’ve got a clear role as Welsh Government to work with the sector and to understand the issue it faces, and in ensuring the quality of the services it provides. Our partners, in particular local authorities and local health boards, as commissioners of care home services, each have important responsibilities at a local level. The sector itself also has a vital role to play. Welsh Government is actively supporting care homes in a number of areas, including funding and workforce, as well as measures to support both the quality and sustainability of services.

The financial challenges faced by the sector are well known and well documented, and we fully recognise this, and are working to achieve a more sustainable model of funding for the sector over the coming years. Our national strategy, 'Prosperity for All', commits us to developing innovative funding models to ensure that funding is available to meet these challenges and the increasing demands on social care. So, to take this forward, the Minister for Health and Social Services is chairing an inter-ministerial group on paying for social care to consider the potential for a social care fund created from a possible levy or variation in income tax in Wales. This would be to raise additional funding for social care in the long term. To date, the group has considered the principle of the potential methods to raise and distribute any additional funding raised in this way and will soon be considering the principle of the priority areas to receive any funding raised.

However, that is in the longer term. Any funding raised in this way is still some time off, and so in the meantime, we have continued to invest in social care, despite the very real and known pressures on our budgets overall. We've awarded an extra £50 million to local authority social services in this financial year to help meet the growing demand for care and support services. Of this funding, £30 million was provided as a grant to support local government in delivering social care, specifically to address workforce pressures and to support the wider sustainability of services.

The care home sector is nothing without a skilled and committed workforce, and I know that there are challenges both in terms of recruitment and retention, and Angela Burns raised a number of those issues in her contribution. I remain absolutely committed to raising the status and the profile of social care workers so that social care does become a positive career choice where people are valued and supported responsibly. We've taken steps to help make the social care sector a more attractive place to work, bringing forward regulations in 2018 to improve the terms and conditions of the workforce. These regulations limit the use of zero-hours contracts and ensure that providers clearly differentiate between care and travel time.

Our drive to professionalise the workforce will ensure that we have safe social care workers who are appropriately qualified to deliver quality care and support to both adults and children in our society. To achieve this, we have extended the workforce register on a voluntary basis to domiciliary care workers, ahead of their mandatory registration from April 2020. Similarly, adult residential care workers, who we're talking about this evening, will be able to register on a voluntary basis from 2020, ahead of their mandatory registration from 2022. I think that this registration will increase the status of the care workers. And where we've seen that the sector is facing difficulties, we've taken direct action to help alleviate them—