I stated yesterday in First Minister's questions that it is important that all of us here in Senedd Cymru, the Welsh Parliament, are candid about the very real challenges facing our beloved national health service right across the four nations of the United Kingdom. There is no corner of the United Kingdom that has not seen extensive pressures on each of its own constituent parts of the national health service. I stand addressing you as a proud Welsh Labour member. The national health service was created by the Labour Government of Clement Attlee, and it is the Labour Party's proudest moment, achievement and legacy to the people it was created to serve.

I know that in Wales its custodians, the Welsh First Minister and Welsh health Minister, understand and are dedicated to its survival and maintenance. Twenty-four hours ago, I asked the First Minister for his assurances that his Government would be devoted to the continuation of the reality of a universal, truly national public health service, free at the point of care, a principle based on experience of suffering, a holy grail battled for with the old BMA, and something my own grandfather fought for as his wife lay dying in childbirth, denied social insurance and subsequent medical care. It is that type of healthcare that I don't want here in Wales. The First Minister gave me his assurance in this Chamber, and I know that my constituents in Islwyn heard loud and clear that, no, we don't want that.

Does that mean, though, that the pressures facing the NHS today are not real? No, it doesn't. There is a clear and obvious danger at the front door of the national health service in primary care. How many of our constituents e-mail us, phone us or write to us as Members of the Senedd to express those concerns, their frustrations and worries about seeing a general practitioner? And yes, there are new ways we are doing things, they are embedding, but the demand of this moment is truly unprecedented since the birth of the national health service.

Community pharmacies play a role, as do our social prescribers, but it's the people of Wales who must be able to access without due hindrance a GP, because the alternatives on the ground are obvious. As we saw before Christmas with the rise in cases of strep A, worried parents with an ill child will, out of real, genuine fear, go to A&E if there are no alternatives. And what person will blame them? When your loved one is in pain and the diagnosis is unknown, who would take the risk of a single second lost? The national health service must exist for the people it was created for—its patients, our citizens.

Wes Streeting, the UK Labour shadow health Minister, has opened an initial exploratory discussion on whether, in the future, GPs should become salaried NHS staff. These are needed conversations with long-standing associations. Reluctance, institutionally, to change—