Llywydd, the first thing I want to do is to pay tribute to the work of agency staff. I’m worried about the tone of some of this debate that suggests that, somehow, agency staff are the problem in the NHS. The NHS absolutely depends upon agency staff. So, I’m not saying that the leader of Plaid Cymru did it, but I do hear in the wider debate some sort of sense that agency staff are somehow to blame, and actually, we depend on agency staff all the time. We wish to depend on fewer agency staff in the future—that is common ground. We put that on the table in the discussions with our health union colleagues last week.

It is not as simple as saying that there is £260 million to be saved; a great deal of that would be paid for people who would be in work on a non-agency basis. There is some increment that you can squeeze out of that sum, and that is an important thing for us to try to do. The bank system is a publicly provided way in which people can work on shifts where they would not normally be employed, and there may be, in the discussions we’ll have with our trade unions colleagues, more that we can do in that area. There will always be a role for agency workers to cover short-term absences, when we know that, sometimes, people will be away for training and other things, and if we didn't have them—if we didn't have them—the system would be under an even greater pressure than it is today.