As Minister for Health and Social Services, I, of course, appreciate the challenges faced daily by our NHS workforce. We've come through a challenging pandemic, largely due to the incredible efforts of our front-line workers, not least the nursing staff, and we will forever be grateful to them for that.

Now, I'm under no illusion that the pandemic is not over and we don't know what surprises still lie in store for us. The fact is that its residual impacts are generating real pressure across the system. The bleak economic forecasts in the coming winter and beyond will have a compounding effect on that. 

Ensuring we have the right workforce skill mix across our health and care system to provide appropriate, holistic, individualised care to the people of Wales is therefore of fundamental importance and on that point I'm sure we all agree. But I'm afraid I'm unable to agree with this petition's assertion that extending section 25B of the Nurse Staffing Levels (Wales) Act is in and of itself going to achieve that. Firstly, the Act requires that an evidence-based workforce planning tool is a necessary component for considering application of section 25B to any particular care situation, and such tools do not currently exist for other situations. So, we're not saying 'never', we're just saying 'not at the moment'. [Interruption.] And any call to apply—if you'd let me finish the sentence, thank you—any call to apply section 25B of the Act across new clinical settings simply ignores that fact. And the fact, for example, when you look at mental health wards, is that they involve more complex care, so they have multidisciplinary teams, so they're more complicated. So, you can't just take what happens on one ward and put it and project it onto another ward. So, we do have to understand that different circumstances require those planning tools to be effective.