The Welsh Government can't abdicate responsibility from this. Yes, many of these pressures reach beyond Wales and afflict other parts of the United Kingdom, but nobody can say that the Welsh Government wasn't warned over many years about this ticking time bomb. Nobody can deny, also, that you have options to address this crisis. We can all see that the Government's handling of this so far has effectively led us to where we are today. Even prior to the strike action taking place by RCN members, the health Minister refused to meet with the Welsh partnership forum, despite the forum's long history of productive social partnership. The refusal to meet with the WPF was unnecessary brinkmanship, copied straight from the Tory playbook. But, subsequent meetings have been fruitless. The recent proposal of a one-off unspecified payment, rejected by the unions as unsatisfactory, speaks to a longer pattern of a lack of coherent strategy around the workforce by the current Minister and her predecessors as well, of course, because much of this isn't new. 

I feel as if the Government is becoming a broken record, blaming the UK Government. And of course the UK Government has a lot to answer for. Crikey, I get up often enough and say that in this Chamber. But, for me, every time the Labour Government here points the finger at the Westminster Government, it strengthens the argument that some of the powers they have there should therefore be devolved here so that we don't have to suffer and don't have to be beholden to the damaging decisions that they make. 

Now, one decision that lays fairly and squarely with the Welsh Government, of course, and it's something I raised last week, is the closure of community hospitals across Wales. We heard how 12 per cent of hospital beds are suffering from delayed discharges, and closing community hospitals, in my view, has made that situation worse. The Minister's retort was that community hospitals are more expensive; quite possibly. I've seen figures that tell a different story, but I've no reason to doubt the Minister's integrity in that respect. But, of course, we were told at the time, when that change was happening, that cost wasn't the driver. The driver was this need to move to a new, better model of care. We were promised enhanced home care, but that was never delivered as promised. We warned at the time of the implications. You will always need that step-down provision for people who are too well to be in hospital but maybe not well enough to be at home. There is that centre ground, that provision that is needed. When you lose that, why are we surprised that there is such a level of delayed discharge in the flow of the system, as it is now? And we graphically see how the closure of community hospitals is at least contributing to the crisis that we're currently in.