I rise to speak to the motion today because of the solidarity I want to show with those people who are campaigning for their hospital services in south Wales at the moment, particularly in terms of the emergency department at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital. I've been there, I've done that, I've got the T-shirt, and I've got the scars to show it: for the campaign, which was a cross-party campaign, that we had to have in order to save our maternity services in north Wales. 

The tall and short of the lesson that I learned in that campaign was that you only ever get the right result when Ministers actually intervene, because that was the situation for us. We were told that services were unsafe and unstable; they had been made unsafe and unstable because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of those services, which is exactly the same case as the situation at the Royal Glamorgan's emergency department right now. The situation was so unstable, we were told that the service would have to close, and there were plans, of course, then to change those services and remove the consultant-led maternity services from Glan Clwyd Hospital, as was the case at the time. 

It took thousands of people marching on the streets—tens of thousands; it took tens of thousands of people signing letters and signing petitions in order to make their voice heard; and it took politicians putting their party politics aside, embracing one another and standing shoulder to shoulder in order to campaign for those services to be retained. Because of that action, that concerted action on a cross-party basis, the then First Minister did actually decide to intervene. And we look to you today as health Minister here in Wales, Vaughan Gething, and we plead with you to be brave enough to challenge the information that's been put before you and to listen to the chorus of voices that was chanting outside of the Senedd earlier on this afternoon, calling for the sitaution to be resolved through your intervention, because I don't believe that it will be resolved without it. 

I want to talk just for a few moments about the fragility of emergency departments, not just in south Wales at the Royal Glamorgan, but of course elsewhere in the country. We know that we have a 95 per cent target for people to be in and out of emergency departments within four hours. Regrettably, that target has never been met. In fact, the situation in terms of the worst performance against that target is, unfortunately, in north Wales. The poorest performing hospital in north Wales at the moment is Wrexham Maelor, which has been breaking records across the whole of the NHS, UK wide. You've got just a one in two chance of getting out of that emergency department within that four-hour target at the moment in Wrexham Maelor Hospital, and a slightly better chance at Glan Clwyd, but still one in two. Two out of 10 people at Glan Clwyd Hospital will wait more than 12 hours—two out of 10. One in five people who walks through the door in an emergency situation will not be discharged for at least 12 hours. 

Now, we know that it's a combination of things that gives rise to these appalling performance statistics. One of them, as has already been referred to, is the number of beds in a hospital. We've seen, over the past decade, certainly in north Wales, one in four beds have been axed from our hospitals. That's bound to have pressure at the front door, which is the emergency department, because if you can't discharge a person from the emergency department into a hospital bed when they need one, then unfortunately they're going to clog the front end of the hospital.

Of course, that leads on to problems then with our ambulance services, because ambulances arrive, they want to discharge patients into the emergency department so that they can get off to respond to the next call, and they're unable to do so. As a result of that, unfortunately, we've seen patients dying while waiting for ambulances, and sometimes facing the indignity of dying in car parks in the back of ambulances outside of our hospital front doors, when the assistance they need is just yards away. It is absolutely frightening.

So, we need extra resources in our national health service, more beds in our hospitals, and we need you, Minister, to intervene in this situation in the Royal Glamorgan Hospital and stand shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues on the backbenches—and I take my hat off to each and every one of them today for challenging your Government over this. We will continue to campaign with those people who were marching outside the Senedd today until we know that the future of these services is secure.