Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, for the opportunity to make a brief contribution in this debate, and it is difficult, I think, to do justice to such a wide-ranging report in this debate. There were a few issues I wanted to pick up on; the first was the very clear link made in the report for the continued need to see action on both 'Everybody's Business', the health committee's suicide prevention report, and the Children, Young People and Education Committee's 'Mind over matter' report. I wanted to place on record again my thanks to Dr Dai Lloyd for the strong partnership that has been established between the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee and my committee. It is absolutely crucial that we do not take our foot off the pedal for a second on delivering on both those reports. They are both landmark reports. They are both reports that had widespread consultation, not just with people with lived experience, but expert stakeholders, and I believe both reports have a huge amount of buy-in. So, I would urge every possible action to continue to prioritise both those reports.

I wanted to focus on two specific recommendations, really, which are recommendation 6 and recommendation 7. These deal with the fact that the committee was really concerned that there was a disconnect between the assurances the committee was given about mental health services continuing during the pandemic and what we heard on the ground. We were being consistently told by Ministers and by the head of the NHS in Wales that mental health services were designated as essential services. But what we heard from stakeholders on the ground was that people had indeed had difficulty getting access to those mental health services that they need, so I entirely concur with the committee's findings that Welsh Government really needs to delve into this and to check that the methods being used to check that people are getting services are actually representative of people's lived experience on the ground. I pay tribute to organisations like Mind Cymru, who are doing lots of work in gathering lived experience, but I think it is also essential that Welsh Government listens to people with lived experience about what their experience has been in the pandemic.

As we have said then in recommendation 7, we have called for mental health services to be prioritised. It has been a consistent aim of both committees for there to be parity between mental and physical health. Yet what we saw in the pandemic, which is somewhat understandable in a physical health emergency, was an immediate change to mental health services, because everything moved online, and online does not work for everyone. Phone calls do not work for everyone, and I think it's crucial moving forward that we ensure that our mental health services are resilient enough to deliver that parity in the kind of crisis that we are facing.

I wanted to just say something about crisis care, because the Welsh Government's response refers to the urgent access review, which is a very interesting document, 'Beyond the call', and I'd encourage Members to take a look at it. It describes the 900-odd calls a day that are made to the police, accident and emergency, and other emergency services for people in need of mental health support. But what I would urge from the Government is urgent action on the other part of that jigsaw, because if people are calling the police and going to A&E in those kinds of numbers, then we have failed miserably in providing the services that we need for people earlier on. We cannot rely on—