I thank the Member very much for those remarks, and I'd like to reiterate our total commitment to the social care workforce. The pay issue has certainly not been kicked into the long grass. As I said in my statement, we need to do this carefully and cautiously because it is a very complex—. The care sector is very complex, and we need to do it in partnership, working with trade unions, working with employers and working with other interested parties. I think it is essential that we move forward in that sort of way, and it would be very foolish to try to rush and do that. 

Nevertheless, we do want to move as quickly as we can because we recognise that social care staff have been paid a very lowly wage for a very long time. So, we do intend to implement some parts of the sector as soon as we can. I hope by April next year that we will be able to start paying some parts of the sector, but we are depending on the social care fair work forum to work with us, in the joint way that I've described, to decide who should be the first social care workers to receive the uplift. And, of course, to work with the local authorities, whom he mentioned, to make sure that we are all working together to reach a common goal, because I think what the pandemic has done is make everybody realise that we do want to ensure that social care workers do get a better deal, and they certainly don't have that now.

We are paying the real living wage and that is a priority in our programme for government and, of course, it's a rate of pay that is independently calculated every year to meet the real cost of living. And it is reviewed—the Living Wage Foundation accredits organisations that pay the living wage—and so this is really, I think, the most appropriate way to move forward. But we do know that more will be needed to be done, but I think the delivery of the real living wage will make a real difference to care workers' lives. But we do accept that it is one step forward. 

I think he referred to the demoralisation of the care staff. Certainly, they've been through a huge upheaval and faced tremendous difficulties that we could never have imagined that they would have done. But I do think that the payment of the two lots of special bonuses was a great uplift to them, because many of them spoke to me and said how this did make them feel that they were being acknowledged, and that their work was being acknowledged. So, I think that was very important. We have worked very hard on trying to increase the professionalisation of the social care staff by registration. That's something that we were doing before the pandemic hit us, and I think it is something that will ensure that the social care staff have pride in their profession. So, I thank him for his remarks, but I think we are going on the right way.