Thank you, Llywydd. I do want to thank the Conservatives for bringing this important issue to the Chamber today, and all Members who have contributed. I have listened to what speakers have had to say, and I recognise a number of the points that have been made. And, overall, we're broadly supportive of the motion. The Government amendment has been tabled to draw together the commitments we have made, the progress under way, and to indicate our approach for the future. I recognise that not every Member will agree with it, but I recognise that people are broadly pointing in the same direction.

I recognise that 33,000 people die in Wales each year and, at any one time, 23,000 people, including 1,000 children and young people, will require palliative care. We know that good palliative care can make a huge difference to the quality of life of people facing life-limiting illness, helping them to live as well as possible and to die with dignity, and for family and loved ones, good palliative care provides a significant amount of support and makes a great deal of difference to their futures, too.

The Welsh Government remains committed to ensuring that anyone requiring palliative care in Wales should have access to the best possible care. So, our palliative care and end-of-life care delivery plan sets out how we are and how we will improve our services, and that plan is, of course, overseen by an end-of-life care board.

We invest over £8.4 million annually to support specialist palliative care services and to take forward the actions in the delivery plan. We are making real progress. We have resources and facilities in place to support advance care planning to ensure that adults and children are central to the design of their care; we have a single all-Wales 'Do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation' form to ensure that people's wishes are respected; and we have a serious illness conversation training programme to ensure that our staff are equipped to handle what can be very difficult conversations with clarity and compassion.

Much of this good work was highlighted in the cross-party group on hospices and palliative care report, which the Welsh Government has broadly welcomed. The recommendations of that report have helped to provide an additional focus as we continue to strive for excellence in this area of care.

Many of those recommendations have either been or are being addressed. There are some that remain outstanding and are being considered as part of the wider stock-take exercise that the end-of-life care board is undertaking. That includes the gaps in data collection for adult and paediatric care needs.

I recognise some of the comments made about comparisons between UK nations' funding, and they're difficult to make—it's not quite a straight-line formula because of the way that the different parts of our NHS in each nation work with hospices in each country. My ambition, and my approach, is to understand the level of need in Wales and then to set out how we will address it, because hospices are central to our approach to end-of-life care and the support they provide to patients, families and carers, and I do not underestimate that.

Once the stock take is complete, we will work with the end-of-life care board and health boards to review the formula mechanism used to allocate funding to adult and children's hospices in Wales. From the specific point that was mentioned about 'Agenda for Change', I can confirm I wrote to hospices in February this year confirming that local health boards will fund any additional cost pressures created by the new contract to charitable hospices in Wales that employ staff on an 'Agenda for Change' contract to provide NHS services.