Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:16 pm on 7 January 2020.
I certainly won't take the Chamber's time by reiterating points that people have made, but I'd like to expand on them, and I think I need to begin by saying that there is much in Welsh Government policy that is incredibly difficult to actually disagree with. We certainly don't disagree with commitments around climate change, and we certainly don't disagree with the policies around prudent healthcare, but I was always brought up to look not at what people said but at what they did. And there is that saying in Welsh, is there not, 'Diwedd y gân yw'r geiniog'/'At the end of any song, there has to be the penny'? And what is frustrating, as Rhun ap Iorwerth has already set out, is the extent to which we have a Government that can sometimes come up with policy that sounds innovative, but then doesn't do the most basic things to make that policy happen. I want to say a little bit more to expand on what Rhun has said, and in some senses to support what Angela Burns has just said about the health and social care budget.
It is a clichéd definition of insanity to keep doing the same thing and expect to get a different result. Now, nobody is going to complain about additional spending on health, but unless we break down the silos between health and social care, those pressures will come on again and again and again. I'm sure it is not a surprise to the Welsh Government that winter comes every year, and every year we find ourselves, one way or another—sometimes it's one health board, sometimes it's another—with a real crisis. This is what we've got in Hywel Dda. We've just had the press release today saying that they are continuing to postpone non-essential operations. Now, if we just keep piling more resources into the health budget itself—and I can see why that's tempting to the Government, because of course that's a budget that they control; well, should control—if we keep doing that, we are not going to change the fundamental problems. We have done some research in Plaid Cymru into this, and for £470 million a year, which sounds like a lot of money, but out of an £8 billion health budget it's peanuts, we could provide free social care in this country to everybody who needs it. Now, would that not be a step to freeing up that problem that we have where people are not able to go into the care settings that they need? [Interruption.] I will very happily take an intervention.