Diolch, Llywydd. I move the self-explanatory motion. We've rehearsed the argument that people require an accident and emergency service within reasonable distance of their homes here on many occasions. The clinical evidence is clear that there's a relationship between distance and mortality in emergency situations, which is even clearer for respiratory conditions; in other words, the sorts of conditions prominent in the poorest areas of Wales like my constituency of the Rhondda.

But the Welsh Government is deciding now not to engage. Rather than taking responsibility and  making the case as to why Wales should have fewer accident and emergency units, which would at least be the honest policy position, this Government is hiding behind the notion that they can't do anything: 'It's not possible', we are told. But we were told it was impossible before. My colleague Helen Mary Jones—who literally wrote the legislation that says they can intervene and stop this under the One Wales Government, which was the coalition that ran between 2007 and 2011—will explain later how Plaid Cymru changed the impossible once before.

But I want to add a further argument to the overwhelming case for retaining accident and emergency services at the Royal Glamorgan and every other existing hospital that has that facility. That argument is that we are highly likely to need all the capacity possible in the coming weeks to deal with COVID-19. Wales lacks critical care beds. It lacks the workforce necessary for staffing those critical care beds. It makes absolutely no sense to argue that now is a suitable time to allow more capacity to be lost. We should be planning on the basis of maximising what capacity we do have, and being prepared to adapt wards if necessary.

But such is this Government's ideological obsession with moving services into the community—a euphemism for closing wards—that they've become incapable of seeing the importance of having secondary care when it's needed. Yesterday's statement on the COVID-19 illness was such a classic example of how embedded this obsession is that they probably don't even realise it. The statement yesterday made no reference to critical care beds. Surely, critical care beds can't be seen as less of a priority than having an online symptom checker, community testing facilities, or protective gear for GPs? Five per cent of people who will contract this virus will become critically ill, and that is not something that is likely to change with these measures. We need capacity to deal with ill people.

Now, there's no doubt we want to see investment in the health services that keep people healthy and enable people to avoid needing to stay in hospitals; this is in just the same way that we want to see fires prevented before the fire service has to be called. But we still need the fire service for when a fire does occur; and we still need an accident and emergency unit for when accidents and emergencies happen. With the best will in the world, many of my constituents already have chronic conditions that can't be prevented, and some of them will inevitably, from time to time, need emergency treatment. They will be put at risk from having to travel further.

Staff shortages have of course been cited as the chief problem—and this is real—but the board hasn't even tried. And why would they? The south Wales programme was approved by Labour and given the go ahead, and nobody was ever going to work in a unit that they knew was being run down. This is exactly why the Government needs to take responsibility, change course, and announce the south Wales programme no longer applies and the health needs of today support the Royal Glamorgan retaining its accident and emergency unit. You can do this. You've done it before. Do it again.