At the start of the pandemic, health and care and wider public services were still recovering from a decade of austerity and you'll recall the very difficult choices that the Government and Members in supporting budgets have had to make in moving money around. The prioritisation of the health service I believe was the right thing, but that caused real difficulties for local government in every part of the country as it meant a reduction in local government income. Just because the cuts that they had to deal with weren't of the scale that colleagues in England had to face, they were still nevertheless incredibly difficult and left our public service partners in a less-than-even-handed manner than you'd want them to; the resilience they had was less than it should have been. The same with the police, of course, who have been key partners in the pandemic response with a significant reduction in the workforce and front-line policing as well.

So yes, we were more vulnerable than I would have wanted us to be at the start of this pandemic. Despite that, what we have seen from local public service leaders is a real willingness to work together and it's a real plus that it's drawn health and local government together with other partners because of the necessity, and I believe that's good ground for those people to work together.

We disagree on whether there should be a significant reorganisation of health and social care responsibilities. My view is that's the wrong thing to do—with an unfinished pandemic—to have a big reorganisation. But I do think that there are good grounds to not just praise the response of health and local government together, but to want to build on that in the sort of joint working that we have frankly found not as easy as we'd wanted to on the scale and the pace we want to see for the transformation that is still needed to make sure that health and social care are a genuinely sustainable system working with each other.