First of all, may I thank my fellow committee members for having collaborated with you on this report? I'd like to thank the clerking team and the wider support team and the research team, and everyone who shared with us as a committee their experiences and their expertise as we tried to better understand the impact of long waiting times for treatment. 

We're at risk at the moment of almost accepting that people are going to have to wait a long time for treatment. It's endemic. One could start to think that it's inevitable, but it isn't. And this report, I think, makes it clear in a number of recommendations that we can't accept the status quo, and that we can't accept that we will return to the pre-pandemic stage, as the Chair said.

The report makes a number of recommendations you could place under a broad heading of reducing waiting lists. We've looked at commissioning higher capacity to strengthen the workforce, to encouraging early diagnosis, to tackle health inequalities—those things that will make a different in the longer term—but I think it was timely to do a piece of work on dealing with the long waiting times we currently have and how they impact people. The statistics are frightening, with something like 0.75 million people in Wales on some kind of waiting list. And it's very important to always bear in mind that these are real people, not statistics, and that many of them are in pain, they're anxious, they see their health declining even further, they can't live their lives as they should, they perhaps can't work, and therefore we need to think of their well-being always as they wait. We make recommendations as to how to support patients as they wait, on investment in helping patients to manage pain, where there's been huge underinvestment. We need to inform people about alternative support that they can access in their communities whilst they wait, support through pharmacists and so on, and there are specific recommendations on those areas. 

It became very apparent to us that there are very fundamental weaknesses in the communication with patients. How many times have we as Senedd Members worked on behalf of a constituent who's reached the end of their tether because they simply don't know where they are on their journey through the health service, or how many times we have listened to someone whilst they explain their physical pain or their anxiety? Recommendation 19 relates to using technology as part of the communications work. I'm wearing another hat as the chair of the cross-party group on a digital Wales, and I will remind you of the words of the Deputy Minister Lee Waters in the Senedd, comparing the kind of service that we have in ordering something online, knowing exactly where your parcel is on its journey—comparing that with what we should expect in the twenty-first century in our health and care service, surely. You know that your Christmas shopping will reach you at 3.30 next Tuesday afternoon, but if you want to know when you'll get something far more important, such as a new hip, well, yes, you can knock on the door of your Senedd representative, but, as a rule, you would go to your GP, who would write to the health board, and they would write back—it produces work. It's ineffective and it leaves patients in the dark. It adds to that emotional strain faced by patients very often as they wait for treatment.

Dirprwy Lywydd, tackling waiting lists in the health service does have to be one of the great priorities of the Welsh Government, if not the priority, and holding them to account on the work that they do in tackling the problem does have to be a priority for us as a Senedd. That is why this report is so important. I'm pleased that the Government has accepted 26 of our 27 recommendations, and accepted the other partially, but we can't be content with that. And very often, in accepting a recommendation, what the Government says is that, 'Well, we're already doing this.' But this is a mountain to climb, and our message as a committee is clear: the Government is not doing enough as things stand, and the people of Wales are suffering as a result of that.