As the Member who leads on local government for Plaid Cymru, I'm very pleased to take part in this debate this afternoon.

We're all aware of the pressure facing local government services and the financial pressures that are increasing, and these were clear back in the days when I used to be a county councillor in the City and County of Swansea, and pressures are worsening and budgets are becoming even more tight. It's true to say that there is additional funding for local government in this draft budget, but it's insufficient to respond to the increasing demands for local government services, as Rhun and Helen have already mentioned. There is so much mention made of preventative services, and it’s in local government that a number of those services are placed, for example, environmental health, housing, education and, of course, social care.

Yesterday, as we've already heard, we heard about the challenges facing the health service in Hywel Dda with winter pressures meaning cancelling treatments that aren't emergency treatments. And indeed, winter after winter, if not year after year, a vast percentage of patients on our acute hospital wards are only there waiting for social care arrangements to be made. They're healthy enough to leave hospital but they can't leave. Six hundred pounds a day is the cost to be in a bed in a hospital. Six hundred pounds per week is the cost to be in a residential home. When close to have the patients on some wards today—. On some wards in Wales, almost half of the patients are healthy enough to leave those hospitals on a medical basis. That situation is appalling. We need to take steps now to change the situation—a step change is needed now. These people are in our hospitals and they shouldn't be there. The arrangements should be made for them. We need to make that step change now.

As well as the lack of beds and the lack of staff, those are the perennial problems that still pose challenges. As others have said, we've been dealing with these issues and we've been discussing them year after year. We need to step up to the plate and take action, as Helen Mary Jones said. So, bearing in mind all of the funding going into social care at the moment, but into a system that is failing and is piecemeal in nature, with patients still suffering, and indeed dying prematurely, a care system that is expensive and complex, with care staff on short-term contracts and zero-hours contracts, and with a lack of training and so on—we all know about these issues—isn't it time to have a radical scheme, a new plan, and have a social care service for Wales that is funded from general taxation, exactly like our national health service, and working in partnership with that service and funded from general taxation, a national care service for Wales, exactly like our national health service? Thank you very much.