Our health and social care services continue, of course, to be at the forefront of Wales's response to the pandemic. On behalf of the Health and Social Care Committee, I would like to thank everyone in health and social care, including the many volunteers and hundreds of thousands of unpaid carers across Wales. We owe them, I think, a debt of gratitude.

The health and social care sector is also working hard to recover and maintain the crucial non-COVID services on which people rely. They're also looking, of course, to the future, towards a post-pandemic reset, which offers a chance to build a more resilient system and help people in Wales live longer and healthier lives. Without a stable and robust and effective social care sector, we can't be confident of course that people will receive the care and support that they need, and risk seeing the impact on health services even worsen.

So, already, too many people are having to spend too long in hospital because suitable care packages can't be provided. Others are being discharged without adequate care packages. Unless these issues are resolved, the funding allocated to health services may continue to increase year on year without delivering more integrated services or improving outcomes. So, in that context, the Health and Social Care Committee welcome the increase in funding for social care. However, we are not yet assured that the allocations in the draft budget will be enough to respond to the immediate pressures or provide longer term stability. Most urgently, further clarity, I think, is needed from the Welsh Government on what is going to be in the immediate term to address the workforce and other pressures facing social care providers and what contingency plans are in place to ensure that people continue to receive the care and support that they need, if pressures facing the sector worsen.

There are also significant pressures on, of course, our health services, and committee members  and I are deeply concerned that the equivalent of one in five people in Wales are on waiting lists, many of which are waiting for long and uncertain periods of time, in pain, discomfort, distress and also in many cases facing financial hardship in that time as well. So, these are issues that we will be discussing with the Minister later this week as part of our inquiry into the impact of waiting time backlogs.

We are pleased to see the investment in the recovery of NHS services; however, we would welcome more detail from the Government on how the Government will assess how the funding for the NHS's recovery plan will transpire, which is of course due to be published in April. In that case, we're obviously very keen to see the new ways of working, new models of service delivery and achieving outcomes and experiences for people who need health and care services. I think meaningful and sustained transformation is absolutely necessary, and I align my own views with the views of Mike Hedges in regard to e-prescribing. I wasn't going to mention this, but, yes, of course, Mike is right: we heard just two weeks ago that the NHS is not only still using fax machines, they're still actually buying fax machines. So, we want to see the Welsh Government continue its use in regard of its budget in terms of driving transformation and increased resilience within the Welsh NHS.

The National Health Service Finance (Wales) Act 2014 gave health boards a statutory duty to break even over a three-year rolling period, so it is disappointing that two health boards are still consistently failing to operate within their budgets and a third is only breaking even as a result of the millions of pounds of additional support each year. So, we agree with the Minister for Health and Social Services that this isn't a sustainable system, and it isn't fair on health boards that are doing the right thing and keeping within their budgets.

The new health and social care regional integration fund and the new capital fund for social care are central pillars of the Welsh Government's transformation agenda. However, we do note that previous transformation funds were criticised by Audit Wales in 2019 on the basis of little evidence of successful projects being mainstreamed and funded as part of public bodies' core service delivery.

And of course, it isn't just about transforming our health and social care services—it's not enough to just do that—we also need to transform how we think about health and how we make sure that they're included and everyone's involved in that. We know there's a high level of chronic disease across Wales; it's too high and there are too many issues of unhealthy lifestyles, and it's all too very common. So, helping everyone in our communities—