Part of 3. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 3:14 pm on 1 March 2017.
Suzy Davies
Conservative
3:14,
1 March 2017
You’re well blessed, Minister, in having this support in helping you make sure that the voice of social care is well represented in what’s likely to be happening over the next period of this Assembly, anyway. One of the things that you won’t find any Opposition from anybody on, I suspect, in this Chamber, is the focus on the integration of health and social care, really focusing on primary and intermediate care levels. These, themselves, are NHS terms. They’re medical structures, and I think an explicit statement of intent to adopt a more social-focused model of integration would actually be pretty welcome in this Chamber. Medical Intervention is, when you come to it, just part of social care. Emotional support and the place of human contact can be just as important, not least to carers, who themselves may not have any medical needs, of course. They’re at the heart of any future look at care—as, indeed, will be the nature of housing and the cross-pollination of skills in an integrated workforce. It’s going to need considerable and ongoing research to support good practice and policy development, so is this a job that you foresee, at some point, Social Care Wales taking over? Obviously it would complement their work in career design and development. And if not, why not?
The cabinet is the group of twenty or so (and no more than 22) senior government ministers who are responsible for running the departments of state and deciding government policy.
It is chaired by the prime minister.
The cabinet is bound by collective responsibility, which means that all its members must abide by and defend the decisions it takes, despite any private doubts that they might have.
Cabinet ministers are appointed by the prime minister and chosen from MPs or peers of the governing party.
However, during periods of national emergency, or when no single party gains a large enough majority to govern alone, coalition governments have been formed with cabinets containing members from more than one political party.
War cabinets have sometimes been formed with a much smaller membership than the full cabinet.
From time to time the prime minister will reorganise the cabinet in order to bring in new members, or to move existing members around. This reorganisation is known as a cabinet re-shuffle.
The cabinet normally meets once a week in the cabinet room at Downing Street.
An intervention is when the MP making a speech is interrupted by another MP and asked to 'give way' to allow the other MP to intervene on the speech to ask a question or comment on what has just been said.
Ministers make up the Government and almost all are members of the House of Lords or the House of Commons. There are three main types of Minister. Departmental Ministers are in charge of Government Departments. The Government is divided into different Departments which have responsibilities for different areas. For example the Treasury is in charge of Government spending. Departmental Ministers in the Cabinet are generally called 'Secretary of State' but some have special titles such as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ministers of State and Junior Ministers assist the ministers in charge of the department. They normally have responsibility for a particular area within the department and are sometimes given a title that reflects this - for example Minister of Transport.
The Opposition are the political parties in the House of Commons other than the largest or Government party. They are called the Opposition because they sit on the benches opposite the Government in the House of Commons Chamber. The largest of the Opposition parties is known as Her Majesty's Opposition. The role of the Official Opposition is to question and scrutinise the work of Government. The Opposition often votes against the Government. In a sense the Official Opposition is the "Government in waiting".
