I want to thank Welsh Government for the positive budget that they have brought forward. UK mismanagement and wider economic pressures make this one of the most difficult budgets since devolution. But Welsh Ministers have continued to protect front-line services, continued to provide help to those most affected by the cost-of-living crisis, continued to support our economy through recessionary times. This is a great achievement.

I want to focus today on how Welsh Government is meeting the social care challenge that our nation faces, a challenge that the Welsh NHS Confederation has described as a national emergency—issues that have gotten worse and that are expected to present even greater levels of challenge. The factors causing this situation have been all too well rehearsed, and, equally, its consequences are all too familiar. The absence of a social care pathway is the primary cause of delayed discharge of medically fit patients. One result is fewer hospital beds being available for new admissions. But this also has personal consequences for the patients who can't be discharged and leads to a vicious cycle of poorer outcomes and greater future reliance on those hard-pressed services.

Investment in social care and getting a system that is fit for purpose are essential for timely hospital discharge and to release some of this pressure. So, at this point, it is reassuring to turn to the budget before us and to see a full and frank recognition of the challenges that our social care sector is facing. I am pleased to see that, above and beyond the commitments in the last spending review, the budget contains a commitment to provide an additional £227 million for Welsh councils. This includes funding for schools and social care, which, of course, are the biggest areas of spending for our partners in local government. Not least of all is the direct attempt to challenge some of the issues around recruitment, to ensure that our social care workforce gets the recognition it should—for example, through the commitment and funding to pay social care workers the real living wage.

I was proud to be elected in 2021 on a manifesto that made this a headline commitment, not least of all recognising the tremendous work that social care staff in my constituency of Cynon Valley and elsewhere in Wales did and continue to do during the pandemic: looking after our vulnerable citizens, ensuring that they could stay safely at home, in some cases, providing that sole link to the outside world. Now, the Welsh Government was able, within last year's budget, to provide funding to deliver this, funding that is crucially being maintained for the next financial year, with an allocation of an additional £70 million for the real living wage for social care workers. This is an incredibly important measure for the approximately 91,000 members of the sector's workforce. As Social Care Wales reminds us, 81 per cent of that workforce is female, so, in delivering this commitment, there's also an important step forward in terms of gender equality and eliminating the pay gap.

The NHS Wales Confederation have asked Welsh Government for a fully funded pay rise for social care staff to enable retention and recruitment, but also to change and challenge perceptions. Care work is skilled work, it is skilled employment. To work in social care, you need a wide suite of skills. Improving social care recruitment and retention via increased pay and better terms and conditions would arguably be the single most effective intervention, and I am reassured that this budget is a step forward in delivering this by Welsh Government putting its money where its mouth is in the budget that we are considering today, but also in wider actions that Welsh Ministers are taking, for example, the work that the Deputy Minister for Social Partnership outlined around fair work and the sector in her progress update last week. Diolch.