There are five amendments in this group. We will be supporting the three that have just been described by the Conservatives.

Amendment 59 is a Government amendment that is a step forward from what we had previously—it talks of the need for the citizen voice body to represent everyone in all parts of Wales. But, do you know what? Those are words, and what we've tried to do through drawing up our amendments for Stage 3 here was to try to put some meat on the bones in order to persuade people that we are serious about creating a new body that will feel close to them, because that is important. Because it's not just the voice of patients—that's not what the CHCs have been; they're also a voice for the communities in which those patients live. And that direct relationship, I think, between the patient voice or the community voice and the communities that they advocate for is something that is truly important to me. And the fear of losing that is one of the main reasons why we cannot why we cannot support this Bill as it currently stands. Because it takes a strong local body with a strong local presence and it will scrap that and put in its place a body that has a structure that we don’t quite yet know what it’ll look like, and a presence at a local level or a regional level, but we have no idea how it will ultimately look.

And let me tell you how this Bill looks from the perspective of north Wales, for example. From the north Wales perspective, it appears here that we have a Bill that is seeking to scrap a very effective community health council in north Wales because it has been very effective in its scrutiny of the Government’s record in running Betsi Cadwaladr. That’s the perception in north Wales. There’s no doubt about that. I’ve referred once already to the excellent work that the north Wales community health council has been doing over the past few weeks and months in engaging with the public across the north-west of Wales on the changes—the disastrous changes, as I see them—to vascular services. And I’ve congratulated them on their work in that area.

Does anyone really believe that a national citizen voice body that is centralised in terms of its ethos could provide that same kind of local scrutiny? I don’t feel that that scrutiny would be in place. Some people would say that it would be focused on south Wales. Now, I don’t want to see a split between north and south. I want an united nation. But I will say that, if you get your way as a Government, establish the CVB and put its HQ in north Wales. That would be positive and would perhaps be a solution to the picture I painted as a scenario just a few moments ago. But that doesn’t resolve problems in other parts of Wales, who would see it as a voice that is overly focused on north Wales. But I have given that invitation now.

But what our amendment and the Conservatives' amendments do is to try and alleviate this problem, to respond to that perception of what is actually happening here by removing that local voice, and what we have done is try to define—. Of course, we’ve been in negotiations with the Government to try and persuade them to provide a definition that can work regionally. We’ve failed, so we’ve brought this forward. And I know that the Government will reject our amendments, and I’m sure they’ll argue that it’ll be very difficult legally to define what is meant by 'regional'. But there are many bodies that work at regional levels, and, to respond to the point made by the Conservatives earlier, we aren’t being prescriptive as to which model to follow here, but we do have many regional bodies—the fire services, the public services boards and so on and so forth—and all the Government would need to do in their policy statement would be to explain what the regional footprint would be.

It could even change over time, and certainly the intention with this amendment is to provide the Government with that flexibility to provide that strong local link whilst continuing from here on in to seek the best model to provide that. We’ve done our very best to meet the Government half way, but we don’t expect the Government to travel with us on that journey, so we will reject the Bill, I fear.