Community activist, Anti Open Cast mining campaigner and leading light in the "Keep our NHS Public" campaign in Wales.

Roy has been an active trade unionist in the engineering industry and has a track record of standing up for working class people and communities.

Roy is particularly concerned that the growing crisis in the NHS is the crucial issue in this election. He believes that everyone should have a public health service that is free at the point, and for the duration of the delivery, that is properly resourced and that treats its staff with the respect, pay and conditions we all know they deserve.

Roy is calling for an increase in NHS spending to reverse the closures, downgrading and redundancies epidemic that has left Wales with less than half the beds available than we had in 1951.

Roy describes the situation as scandalous, "Despite our poor health levels we have fewer doctors or hospital beds available than the European average."

To ensure a decent health service the Communist Party says: * Scrap the internal market. The waste of the Tory inspired "internal market" in the health service must be ended. It has created a boom in accounting and managerialism and wasted millions that should have gone to front line services.

* Public control and ownership. The health service should be in public control in its entirety. This includes the public control of drug companies and other related industries and services feeding off the NHS. It means that big business will not be given undue influence or preferential treatment. The privatisation of services has proved a disaster in the health service with anything up to 20% of existing budgets being siphoned off for private profits.

* Tax the rich. To pay for increased investment in our health service the super rich should pay a significantly higher rate of corporate tax than the current low levels. Despite being one of the most unequal societies the rich in this country pay one of the lowest rates of tax in Europe.

* No excuses. The excuses given for not funding the health service adequately are due to a lack of political will. If Britain managed to produce a National Health Service in the unfavourable conditions of 1948 then there is really no excuse today.