Can I begin my contribution by thanking members of the committee, and our new member as well, for their contributions today, but also John and his chairing for taking us back to look at this issue, which predecessors on this committee, under his stewardship, have looked at—both this and also wider issues related to it as well? I think it was well worth doing, because it's probably one of the most rewarding experiences that I've had as a committee member in my time to actually be sitting down with people with lived experience of rough-sleeping, of homelessness, and them talking us through it. It was very difficult, very challenging—both for them but also for us to hear what they are telling us, frankly, where they've been through the mill time and time again. It's like a game of snakes and ladders, but where the snakes are immeasurably longer and the fall much deeper than the ladders—the slow step up, bit by bit.

We did hear of good practice, but in pockets, and this difficulty of not only leadership locally on the ground within individual organisations, within individual areas, but also how to disseminate that wider, because one of the themes that was consistently said to us is that, actually, we can see what works. When you have all of the services properly co-ordinated, when, as was said to us, there should be a no-wrong-door approach—when you present with an issue of rough-sleeping or homelessness, the services there should pick you up and then wrap around you, one way or the other.

Of course, one of the examples of this that we heard that there was good success, in Wrexham and in other places, was, of course, the Housing First approach there, but it's not, we were told as well, by many people, including those representing organisations involved directly in providing the Housing First approach, the magic bullet. It's a very good approach, and credit to those who are taking it forward and the Welsh Government for supporting it, but it's not a one-size-fits-all model on it.

But it's worth reflecting not just on some of the challenges but the way forward, because we were told by people—by witnesses in front of us—that we have the right framework in Wales that should be able to fix this, so that we can get to the point where the best practice we see is as normal. We were told this by people who came in front of us, and the frustration over, as Delyth has just said, people saying to us, 'We don't want to be back here in three years' time under John or somebody else's stewardship saying, "Let's have a look at this again" and point out the same things, and how we're still failing on culture, on leadership, on sharing best practice and on that no-wrong-door approach there.'

So, let me just pick up on a couple of things here that came directly out of the report that Ministers have looked at. We were told by many witnesses that one problem was the commissioning process. We were told, and it's there in the report, as one witness told us—. So, if you've got a sector driven by competition, and we did pick that up a lot—even though many organisations out there were trying to do the right thing, many of them also felt a little bit guarded, because they felt they were also in competition with other organisations that are overlapping but not quite with the same objectives, which is quite interesting.

So, if you've got a sector driven by competition, we were told, it means, first of all, nobody can be vulnerable, nobody can say, 'These are the lessons we've learnt, look at what a cock-up we made over here, we need to change it.' Nobody can be vulnerable, everybody has to be brilliant all of the time, especially so Ministers can see they're being brilliant to keep their contracts, to keep doing their work. Well, if you can't have a system that's vulnerable, you don't have learning cultures that are swift and agile and can flex, unless you completely step outside the system and are prepared to do something else. In fact, we did speak to some people who had stepped outside of the system entirely, and had chosen, then, to do things outside of the system without support. And to commend them, they were achieving amazing things but they couldn't fit it into the boxes that they were told to do it within.

And we also heard about this big dilemma where people were choosing not to access services sometimes because they felt it was better for them to be on the streets. That was quite remarkable. Members of the public out there, my constituents would say, 'Surely that cannot be right', but we heard about this. We heard from one witness, 'The real thing that's stopping people coming in is that the offer we have in services is less than what the streets offer.' If you're in the throes of addiction, you've got all these complex mental health issues and other things—you can turn that pain off with spice or heroin quite easily. We can't offer that. You can be nobody in a flat or you can be somebody on the streets. There are cultural implications as well for people who've been out there for a long time.

This is getting beyond the tabloid headlines with this stuff—the complexity of this. I was immensely proud to be part of this. I think the homelessness action group will pick up on some of the acceptance in principle positions of the Minister, and bring forward, I think, some of the solutions, because this is still a work-in-progress. Lots of good work is going on, Minister, but getting a grip on this I think will be day after day, week after week, month after month, until we don't have to come back in three years and say, 'Look at what we're pointing to again.'