I recently visited Glyndŵr University in Wrexham, which has expanded to now offer nursing and a variety of allied health degrees, plus retraining, in fantastic new spaces with the latest technology. The bursary in Wales for training also makes a huge difference. Nursing and other staff get such a hard time and morale is low, so we need to promote nursing and health as a career, and we need to ensure that both Governments invest in people when looking at rebuilding the economy, not just construction and the private sector. We also need to create career pathways for specialist services, such as mental health nurses. We need to build back our public services and ensure there is adequate funding from the UK Treasury to give decent wages and employ more front-line staff, so that we can retain those we have on decent hours without pushing them to exhaustion. Not only nurses, but also care workers, allied health professionals, porters, administrators, advisory services, housing officers, teachers—all these impact on health and desperately need funding. And the pot is being cut, eaten up by inflationary pressures, not just caused by the war, but also Brexit, 12 years of austerity and terrible decisions made by the recent Conservative Prime Minister, creating a £30 billion pressure and rising inflation. I understand that the NHS energy bill black hole this financial year is £100 million. Councils are still facing an £802 million budget black hole, and the delayed transition to care is a huge issue, and it's a delicate funding balance. One cannot be addressed without impacting on the other. We simply need more funding from the UK Government for public services to cover all the inflationary rises.

But in terms of what the Welsh Government can do, I'd also like to know what consideration has been given to reducing NHS reliance on agency staff, in turn allowing them to improve pay for NHS workers and address the recruitment crisis, so we have more directly employed nurses. I believe the total spend on agency nursing for 2021-22 was £133.4 million, which has increased by 41 per cent from the previous financial year. At present, agencies are offering substantial hourly rates. For example, adverts are currently live for an agency nurse in Wrexham Maelor Hospital offering between £23 and £48 per hour, so even at the lower end of this offer, the pay is considerably higher than what an NHS nurse would receive; I think it's about £16 an hour. Earlier this year, I met with the Royal College of Nursing regarding NHS nurses' pay and conditions, and it was raised with me that, if health boards stopped paying to bring in agency staff to fill the gaps and instead directly employed nurses on improved pay and working patterns, there would be no need to pay the high cost to agencies in the first place. Because I was wondering how this cycle could be broken, and if it's not quite so clear, maybe we could just pass that information on to nurses as well, so they understand.

So, Minister, in your response, I'd like to know what the Welsh Government is doing to break the cycle of reliance on agency nurses, to ensure money goes directly into employing NHS nurses rather than relying on the expensive agency route. And if it's not that simple, please can you let me know why it's happening? Thank you.