We'll now turn to party leaders' questions, and the first this afternoon is Adam Price.

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. Seeing those big, bold 'delivered' stamps on your annual report's opening page, First Minister, I was reminded of a paper I recently read about your Government, which said this:

'There tends to a box ticking drive to ensure Manifesto and Programme promises can be said to have been met. What I have never seen is an overall attempt to assess whether the desired outcomes underlying the Programme...are being advanced.'

Nowhere in your report do you acknowledge your failures, the missed targets, the broken promises. You said you'd eradicate fuel poverty by 2018; you didn't. You said you'd abolish child poverty by 2020; you didn't. You said you'd cut emissions by 40 per cent by last year; you didn't. To quote that paper again, about your Government:

'The current mindset puts delivery second best to maintenance of the status quo.'

Doesn't that just about sum things up, First Minister?

Well, Dirprwy Lywydd, the Member appears to have picked up the wrong speech. There's a debate on the annual report later this afternoon. He'll be able to recycle his remarks, no doubt, again there. I think people who live in Wales do not share his sneering attitude to 20,000 new affordable homes here in Wales. Those young people who've taken part in the 100,000 additional apprenticeships would not share his view; neither will those thousands of older people who have benefitted from the most progressive approach to people being able to retain their assets when they go into residential care, nor those people who have benefitted from the new treatments fund, reducing the length of time waiting for new drugs here in Wales from 90 days to 13 days. Those are real differences in the lives of real people right up and down Wales. That's what I stand for. That's what the Labour Party stands for. He may prefer the vacuities of independence and other high-flown sentiments. We will deal with those things that make a difference in people's lives, and that is why they know that this Government is a Government that is on their side.

First Minister, the remarks I just read out are not my views—they're the views of someone who was a non-executive director of your Government for almost a decade. It's difficult to find a more damning indictment than this statement from them about that experience:

'I have never been part of a Board with such a lack of measures of progress or outcome success.'

You campaign in poetry and govern in prose, so the saying goes, but you deliver in numbers, because, without metrics, you are rudderless and directionless, and that's as true of your future vision, First Minister, as it is of your past delivery. This is what Welsh Labour grass roots had to say about your policy proposals for the election in May: 'they lack…transformative edge', they're 'cautious and uninspiring', they

'fail to measure up to the scale of the challenges that Wales…will face over the years ahead.'

You can dismiss my criticisms of your Government, First Minister, but can you dismiss the words of the very people who campaign to put you in the position you're now in?

Well, Llywydd, our proposals for the next Senedd term will be published in Labour's manifesto. When the Member has seen it, he'll be able to make a judgment on it. He hasn't seen it; neither have the people that he appears to quote.

Well, the Labour activists I've quoted are critical of your party's final policy document, which I have seen, because it does not commit to extending free school meals—the very policy you've been attacking me on for these last few weeks. It seems I'm now closer to Labour values than you are.

The document contains few new ideas, but at least some new admissions. In it, Labour Party members, and I quote, highlighted the

'need for investment and policy change to build greater resilience to intense weather events', which is a clearer admission than we've ever had from Ministers that you've failed to spend enough on flood defences, with disastrous consequences. It's hard to disagree with Labour members when they call in the document for more detail on a Labour vision for the future of farming, when your vision at the moment is no future at all. But perhaps the most telling sentence of all is this: the offer of social care free at the point of need—another Plaid Cymru policy—is desirable. The question is, First Minister: will it ever be deliverable with you and your party at the helm?

Well, Llywydd, I have previously offered the Member an opportunity of a membership form for the Labour Party, in which he takes such an interest, because, if he did, he would be more familiar with the policy-making processes of my party. So, my party has not completed its policy-making process. There is no final document, to which he mistakenly refers. Indeed, I am looking forward to spending Saturday with members of my party looking at some 700 different proposals that party units right across Wales have contributed to the final stages of our policy-making process. The Member, I'm afraid, has simply been misled in believing that he understands the way that the Labour Party operates. We will continue to develop our policies. We will put them in a manifesto. Our manifesto will a deliverable manifesto. It will not be an uncosted wish list of the sort that he has spent many months now developing—social care today; more hundreds of millions of pounds he hasn't got to spend—never an attempt to tell us where that money will come from, of course, following the last couple of weeks' wish lists in relation to other things that he thinks that, simply by dangling them in front of people, he will persuade them to support. The Welsh public, unfortunately for him, is more discerning than he gives them credit for. They will know that, when promises are made, the wherewithal to keep them has to be found as well. That is why, later this afternoon, we will demonstrate that the promises made by my party at the last election have been delivered during this Senedd term. That is what people expect, not the sort of fantasy policy making that the Member continues to offer us here. 

We turn to the leader of the Conservative group, Andrew R.T. Davies. 

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. First Minister, I'd like to address the issue of waiting times in Wales, and I appreciate there are pressures on waiting times across the United Kingdom but, in Wales, for example, they're particularly acute, with 530,000 patients on a waiting list for starting treatment—the highest on record since data was first collected in this format since 2011. Two hundred and thirty one thousand of those patients have been waiting 36 weeks or more. That's a nearly 1,000 per cent increase from November 2019, when 22,000 patients were waiting over 36 weeks. And between March and November, there were 20,000 fewer urgent cancer referrals compared to the same time previously in the last 12 months. This is a matter of huge concern I think you'll agree, First Minister, so what action is your Government doing to address these waiting times here in Wales? 

Llywydd, I do agree with the Member that waiting times in the NHS are a cause of real concern a year into coronavirus, and he is right that that is a common position right across the United Kingdom. The first thing we have to do, and the most important thing that we can do, is to draw out of the health service the burden that it currently has to bear of people suffering from coronavirus to such an extent that they have to be treated inside the hospital, with all the impacts that that has on the ability of the health service to carry out all of the other things that we quite rightly look to it to do.

And in that regard, as the Member will know, at present we are succeeding—positivity rates down in Wales again today; the rates per 100,000 down across Wales again today. And this week I think, for the first time, we can see with some confidence that feeding into a reduction in pressures in the hospital system—for the first time for many weeks, fewer than 1,000 patients with confirmed coronavirus in a hospital bed, and the number of people needing intensive care significantly down in the last week as well.

That's the underpinning condition that we have to reach in order to reconstruct the health service for the future, and then when we are sure that we can create that capacity by having COVID-19 under control, then the health service will have a plan, and the plan will be based on clinical prioritisation. It'll be a plan led by clinicians, making sure that those whose needs are the most urgent will always in Wales be at the front of the queue. 

First Minister, it is a fact, as I identified in my opening remarks, that waiting times are large across the United Kingdom—I accept that—but here in Wales they are particularly acute, with one in five people on a waiting list from the whole population. And where my concern comes into play here is the urgency the Government is putting into this to have a plan of recovery out of COVID. When you have the chief executive of Tenovus Cancer Care saying that they have faced pushback from Ministers when it comes to recovery plans for cancer services, and the report that Macmillan Cancer Support identified last week that 3,500 have gone with undiagnosed cancer because of coronavirus, this surely is a huge concern to us all, because of the detrimental impact this has on outcomes, and the longer term pressures on the health service.

So, why are the cancer charities saying that they are facing pushback from Ministers when it comes to putting an urgent cancer plan in place, and, if that pushback doesn't exist, will you commit to developing that cancer plan that is urgently required, as Tom Crosby has identified—the cancer lead for Wales—that the cancer services in Wales will have to perform at 120 per cent to 130 per cent of capacity to get into these waiting times that we are facing here in Wales? 

Well, Llywydd, I agree that the challenge that faces the health service post coronavirus is very real, that it will not be a recovery that will happen overnight, and I agree that it will need to be a recovery that is properly planned, and planned with clinicians. There is no pushback from this Government in terms of making sure that our health service is in a position to recover. There is a dialogue, and a dialogue does mean that there will be competing perspectives and different pressures. Now, the health Minister has been in conversation with interests in the cancer field very recently indeed in order to be able to plan ahead, as I said in my answer to the first question this afternoon from Rhianon Passmore. Cancer services have been classified as an essential service by the Welsh Government right through the pandemic. We have to do more to give patients, sometimes, the confidence to come forward and to take up treatment when they are fearful of the level of coronavirus in circulation. And I echo the views of the health Minister, which I've heard him say very recently, that, where people have treatments available to them, particularly where those treatments are urgently necessary, we urge those people to come forward, because our health service has organised itself to make sure that those treatments can be delivered safely and successfully.

Regrettably, in that answer, First Minister, I didn't hear you identify the plan to take services forward so that they can engage with some of those 3,500 people who've gone undiagnosed, as well as developing services across Wales to meet the challenge of the waiting times that I addressed to you in my first question. We do know that waiting times were a problem before the pandemic, where twice as many patients were waiting over a year than the rest of the whole of England. It is really important that we understand the level of activity that's going on in the NHS at the moment. Will you commit to publishing the activity data that the Welsh Government holds on procedures within the NHS here in Wales, and will you also commit to convening a national recovery board of the professions to make sure that, working with Government Ministers, patients and clinicians within the health service can have confidence that these plans are being developed and will be implemented so that we do not continue getting reports such as the Macmillan report last week that identified so many undiagnosed cases of cancer across Wales? And could you commit to publishing your response to the Secretary of State for Wales and the Secretary of State for health in England, when they offered mutual aid to support any efforts that might be put forward here in Wales to address waiting times and address getting people through the health service?

Well, Llywydd, the final point is a piece of nonsense, isn't it? We publish figures monthly. The so-called offer from the Secretary of State was sent to us just at the point when English hospitals became overwhelmed by the level of coronavirus that they were facing. There's no offer of mutual aid in a system where they have twice the level of infection that we do here in Wales. It really—. To be honest—to be frank, Llywydd, it's just a piece of political games playing and it undermines the efforts of those of us who want to have a serious four-nation approach to recovering from this pandemic.

I've set out the plan already, Dirprwy Lywydd. The first part of the plan is to get coronavirus under control. I note that, for the second week in a row, neither opposition party leader wants to ask me any question about the most vital part of the health service in Wales today—the outstandingly successful vaccination programme here in Wales. As ever, with opposition parties, whenever anything is going well in Wales, they don't have a good word to say for it. For two weeks running, they couldn't find even a single question to ask about that outstanding success. That success will allow us to do what I explained to the Member, and that is to help us to get coronavirus under control, to draw out of the health service the pressure that it currently feels in dealing with the pandemic, and then to recover and to restore services outside coronavirus on the basis of clinical need. That will of course be designed with the professional groups that we are lucky enough to have in the health service in Wales. The serious job, rather than the petty, point-scoring approach to health service recovery, is one that people in Wales can be sure that this Government will pursue on their behalf.