I think there are some central challenges there. In terms of the progress, I was actually really impressed by how the first three or four regional partnership boards managed to agree their proposals in the time that it took to agree them. In particular, I can honestly say that I thought that north Wales, given the range of challenges that they're facing, agreed an approach very quickly. I expected them to be slower than they were, and I think that's a testament to the improved partnership relations that exist, from all partners in the room around the regional partnership board table.

It's then the challenge of getting it from having a plan, and then recruiting people, and more than that about backfilling some of those posts as well as people then move around. We've seen this, for example, in some of our other programmes where we've decided to move people around. To have a plan that everyone signs up to, but then to recruit those people there's a process to go through, all the people who are doing the recruiting, and then the recruitees are then moved, and then to make sure that we don't undermine the services that we currently have.

Because we've deliberately done this to double run services, because we haven't wanted to withdraw services and then say, 'We are creating something that will be great, so just cope without it for a while.' So, we've done this deliberately, and the practical reality of doing that has rubbed up against what should have happened or would have been possible in theory. So, it's simply a practical point, and I didn't want to shorten the time that each of those transformation projects had to demonstrate the value that they'd delivered in transforming the system. That's why I've extended the time frame for those transformation fund proposals to run, to be evaluated, and then for choices to be made.

Now, the transformation fund goes up to now the end of March 2021, and of course there are other events that many of us will be involved in at about that time, in terms of the future of the Assembly and looking at who the next Government is. There's a choice about what choices are being made at the very end of this Assembly term, although we'll be a Welsh Parliament/Senedd by then, with our name change. At that point, we need to make some choices about what the future looks like, and choices we can make within the budget. But then whoever the Government is will want to make choices about what to do to move things forward. That's the central point: not just, 'Do we have a list of things that appear to work?', but, 'How do we then make them work across the system?' That's one of the challenges I set about having projects that are potentially scalable, as well as the honesty about where things haven't worked and turning the tap off.

So, Ministers can do a number of things to try to encourage people to work together and to roll things out. You can encourage, and tell people you're very impressed with them, and that does work from time to time with different people. You can demand and bang the desk, if you like, and there are Ministers in different institutions who think that's the way to do things—that isn't the approach I take. You can have legal powers—you can either change the law or use the legal powers you have to force people or require people to do things. And we've taken some of that approach, for example, with the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 that Gwenda Thomas piloted through this place. That required people to have pooled budgets in place, but actually, despite the legal requirement, bringing it together has been very difficult, and there are real practical challenges. In this space, I think, they'll have reasonable relationships and they'll be in an even better place to have to make choices together, and they've made choices about how to spend not just money, but to deliver improvement.

Then the two things that I think will really help to drive where are is about how we tie money into it. So, even with the £100 million that we've announced now, and I've confirmed how it will be spent today, that has generated more than £100 million in the sense of the extra work that has been generated across regions, between partners, and I expect we'll see more of that. There are choices that Ministers will need to make in the future about whether we expect to see a roll-out and to tie it into money, and there are incentives for doing things, about choosing how to move on on some of this. And there's also just a necessity for change, because the parliamentary review talked about the necessity for change. And we have choices, and our central choice is to allow change to happen to us, because we wait for a point of crisis and our system breaks. We have to fix it in a rush. Or we'll make a choice, because a necessity drives us to it, because we can see that point coming closer and closer to us. Now, I think it would be a combination of each of those, but I'm most interested in the willingness and the necessity that partners have, the commitment to want to do things differently, to get over some of the organisational and cultural barriers to change. And I do think that the way that we use money will be a key part of that as well, to incentivise the future.