First Minister, yesterday, you confidently claimed at a press conference that plans for hospitals and health boards to cope with pressures for the winter period were holding up. You even highlighted that your Government had provided £30 million—very welcome—earlier than ever in the year to help health boards prepare for winter. However, I think within about half an hour of your press conference, my local health board, Hywel Dda, announced they'd experienced a level of escalation not seen before—we've been there before, haven't we, team—and that they would be canceling all inpatient operations across all of their hospitals in the interests of patient safety. This is shocking. This is the end of elective surgery in Hywel Dda at the moment.

First Minister, it's blatantly clear that the spin you provided to the press was not based on fact, or that you yourself are fully abreast of the current situation in our hospitals here in Wales. First Minister, when will your Government accept that there's a need for strong leadership of the Welsh NHS because these winter pressures happen—guess what—every winter? And we've been through this before. Yet again, the people in my constituency are having to wait endlessly for knee operations, hip operations, all manner of elective surgeries. There never seems to be an end to it.