Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 25 October 2022.
On those three points, Llywydd, first of all, as soon as there is a Labour Government, we will be able to implement the Labour promises. I've explained to you—[Interruption.] I've explained to you why, under your Government, with budgets falling year by year, and now another era of austerity facing us all, the promises that your health Secretary made in England will not be met. With a Labour Government, then those things will be different and then of course we will see things improve, as we did under the last Labour Government. And I explained to you that long waits in the NHS continue to fall, despite everything else that the health service is doing, and everything else the health service is doing extends to trying to make sure that we have a sustainable orthopaedic service here in Wales. That is a challenge, Llywydd. We have an ageing population. We have more work that needs to be done. We have operating theatres still not able to complete the volume of activity that they were before the pandemic, and yet, as I said, in August alone there were 24,000 operations carried out in the Welsh NHS, and 230,000 out-patient appointments. While I regret anybody who is waiting too long for the operation they need, what I say to them is the system is working as hard as it can, it is gaining ground not losing ground, and we will continue to invest both financially but also in the staff that we need to make sure that our NHS continues to provide the treatment it does at that industrial volume that I've just described to you from the month of August alone.