Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:52 pm on 6 November 2019.
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I'm grateful to everybody who's participated in the debate. Angela Burns is right of course to highlight the new challenges, people who may not feel that they fall into the traditional groups of people who may be vulnerable to the virus. I also very much want to associate myself with what she said about the principle of 'accept in principle'. I think many of us who work on the committees in this place would rather, where it's appropriate, that if the Government doesn't fully agree with our recommendations that they simply disagree, but that's a matter of course for the Minister himself.
I think what Rhun ap Iorwerth said about being ambitious about targeting sooner, that because we are a small country, because we have responsive health services, we ought not to be content only to meet the 2030 target, but we should look to be more ambitious. I would urge, on behalf of the committee, the Welsh Government to look again at that.
Similarly, Caroline Jones's point about the need for a national strategy, I hear what the Minister says that strategies can be bureaucratic, that people can end up spending more time dealing with responding to the strategy than they do in actually sorting out the problem, but the evidence that came before us is that a particular strategy for this condition is needed, because if it's put in with a whole load of other conditions, we were told that it would get lost.
I want to draw on a particular point in the Government's response to our recommendation about a national strategy, and that is with regard to the specialist posts. The Minister's response says that he can't guarantee that the specialist posts will continue, though he understands that they will be needed. Of course, I take the point that the Minister doesn't know what his budget will be in 2021, but it is extremely important that those specialist and innovative posts are maintained, and I hope that this Assembly can send the Minister a very clear message and ask him to prioritise that.