So, there’s a Labour Government now in Westminster to serve alongside our own Labour administration in Wales. And five months into this pairing that have pledged to reduce treatment waiting times for cancer patients, their statistics are getting worse, not better.

Back in 2019, the Labour Government in Cardiff Bay set the target that 75 per cent of patients in Wales who need cancer treatment would begin their pathway within 62 days.

62 days? It might as well be 100 days, or 162 days, given the way things are going right now.

And now, five years on, according the the latest figures from the Welsh Government, things are going from bad to worse.

If you suffer from lower gastrointestinal cancer, you’re drawing the thin end of the wedge. Just 37 per cent of patients with these types of cancers begin treatment within that 62 day window.

Across Wales, some 7,200 people waited for more than two months to begin treatment between January and September. And no health board - NONE - met the Government’s target.

Let’s put some perspective on things.

That promise to reach those targets was made in 2019. In 2023, the Welsh Government wasted £32 million on bringing in 20mph zones up and down our communities in an effort to improve road safety. The tall foreheads who guided Cardiff Bay estimated that the measure would save 100 lives a year.

But how many cancer patients could have been effectively treated with that £32 million?

Come the next Senedd elections, the Cardiff Bay talking shop will expand by 36 new members, adding some £18 million more to the cost of our government.

But how far would that £18 million go in making sure that the sick people of this nation received the care they deserve - and were promised?

We don’t need more politicians telling us what they plan to do to improve things in our broken National Health Service. What we really need is more care, better care, quicker care. And to do that means putting more money into it, hiring more consultants, more radiologists, more staff.

Not more talkers and takers.

We need action and accountability.