Well, Llywydd, I think there are a number of reasons that lie behind that unfortunate fact. The biggest one is that we take too many children away from their families here in Wales. This is a point that I have tried to make ever since I was the health Minister and responsible for social services. We take children away from their families in Wales at twice the rate that children are taken into care in England, and the result of that is that our local authorities find that all their budgets, all the staff that they have, are having to deal with the number of children who are already in the care of that local authority, and when new needs arise and children have to be attended to, there isn't the capacity there to respond in the way that we would like.

We have had a concerted campaign with local authorities over the last three years to try to address and reverse this trend. This is a trend of 20 years and probably more, Llywydd. Year after year, the rate at which children are taken away from families in Wales rises. That delivers a poor service for those children and it delivers a particularly poor service for those families who look for preventative help from a social services department, who find that there's no capacity to do that because their hands are so full of children already inside the care system.

There are local authorities in Wales that buck this trend, that manage to reduce the number of children and look after them safely in other ways. I commend particularly the record of Carmarthenshire County Council, which has a 20-year record of being able to keep numbers going in a different direction, and in more recent times the actions of Neath Port Talbot Council, which has significantly reduced the number of children they take into the care system, freeing up resources to help families to stay together. If you don't do that, then the system is under such pressure that, when children do come into the system, it struggles to provide the immediate help that is necessary for them.