I want to write to Peter Fox
Peter Fox: ...to some and large wads of cake to others. That is morally wrong. We need to do something to change that, moving forward. Mike was quite right, and I touched on some of that in my opening about school balances and other elements of the reserves. Mike's also right that we need to understand how the SSA, the standard spending assessment, is built, so that we can challenge it and analyse it...
Peter Fox: ...is a £600 million increase in useable reserves on the previous year. Useable reserves are not just the general reserves; they are the earmarked reserves as well. Yes, there is a portion that is school balances, which is a minuscule amount of the £2.75 billion. There is also a portion of capital in there that is a relatively small amount. The general largest pots are in the earmarked...
Peter Fox: ...comes as a Time to Change Wales survey found that over half the respondents had either an experience of a mental health problem or knew someone who did in the 12 months up to the survey. Turning to education, at a time when Labour Government Ministers have been telling us that raising school standards is an underlying objective of education reform, it is baffling that support for school...
Peter Fox: ...and Scotland, with Wales sitting at the bottom of Britain's GCSE and Programme for International Student Assessment rankings. Welsh Government has chosen not to spend all of the money it could on education, even though our system is underperforming. Indeed, your budget this year cut the education and Welsh language budget in real terms, alongside an actual cut of £43 million in cash...
Peter Fox: 6. What assessment has the Minister made of the impact of the Welsh Government’s budget on educational standards? OQ59257
Peter Fox: We must not forget that, for every £1 spent on the health service in England, Labour received £1.20 for Wales. And the same for education: £1 in England, £1.20 in Wales. Yet, we know that, in Wales, even before the pandemic, the Labour Government was only spending £1.05 on both of those. This begs the question: where has this money gone? Why is it not being used to deliver the healthcare...
Peter Fox: ...distracted by new powers and pet projects on which they have been wasting time and money over many years. What is unique to Wales is the growing crisis in our Welsh NHS, missing aspiration in our schools, and Wales’s decades-long housing crisis—all a direct result of 25 years of poor policy making by Labour. In this budget, we should have seen more money being directed towards...
Peter Fox: ...investment over the 10 years, albeit that it's a huge amount of money, and I know that many Members in here would have liked to have seen that money spent in many other areas, such as health and education, and we might not have found ourselves in the poor situation we're currently in, but that's where we are. Unfortunately, Minister, examples of lost opportunities under the Government just...
Peter Fox: ...issue that was raised with me was that there generally isn’t straightforward signposting available for young people with additional learning needs and their families who wish to attend post-16 education. I’m sure, Minister, that you’ll agree that there should be a process to ensure that a young person’s needs can be met. But, from what I understand, there are frustrations that...
Peter Fox: What I'm suggesting here is something not dissimilar to what we would do if we were leading councils and we found our schools accruing huge balances and not using those for the purpose they were created for, that resource to help educate our young children. This is purely suggesting that where a council holds significant reserves above a threshold, a small adjustment of £150,000 per £1...
Peter Fox: ...this, there are areas of the draft budget where the Welsh Government are letting so many people down, as we've just heard from the Chair of the Finance Committee, such as the real-terms cut in the education budget. Then there's the real-terms cut in the health and social care budgets. And let's not forget that the only Government in Britain to actually cut the NHS budget was a Labour...
Peter Fox: Thank you, Laura, and education is absolutely fundamental and at the core of this. It is morally wrong in this day and age that we see obesity climbing as it is, especially in our young people. If we don’t act now—it’s not dissimilar to the climate change argument—what happens in the future? We have to, it’s our responsibility to lay the foundations of a better system for our...
Peter Fox: Thank you, Jenny, and thank you for your support. Can I thank you for the work that you're doing in this area within the cross-party working group for school meals, and what you are aspiring to see? I've been happy to work with you on there, because we need to alter the nature of the food that our young people are accessing. We need local, sustainable food within our communities. Sadly, we...
Peter Fox: ...do that? Well, of course, as Mabon said, we have to start helping people understand and children understand the benefits of quality food and how we can use it. That's why it's so important that our education system responds to that aim and that goal. If we can help people start understanding the benefits of food, they might change their food habits. These processes are long, but you have...
Peter Fox: ...what my priorities are, include unblocking the social care system, tackling waiting times within the Welsh NHS, investing in councils and public services and boosting our economy, supporting our schools and young people, and, importantly, helping families with the cost-of-living crisis. I'm not for a moment suggesting that any of these challenges are easy; they are all things that we need...
Peter Fox: ...them understand and better scrutinise reserves and how they may be used. Minister, will you consider reviewing earmarked reserves held by some councils in the same way that councils do with their schools, to understand if earmarked reserves are genuinely being used for their intended purposes, perhaps assessing if they have been drawn down in the past five years or longer and, if not,...
Peter Fox: ...minimal useable reserves. Minister, do you think that, at a time of such financial pressure for our country, it's right for some councils to hold so much in reserves? I know that a portion will be school balances and some will be capital, but some councils hold significant amounts of useable reserves in dormant, unused, earmarked accounts. So, shouldn't the Government find better and...
Peter Fox: ...in Wales had experienced or had seen some form of online violence on social media. This has had a profound effect on not only the mental health and well-being of these young people, but their education and wider lives too. In Wales, 57 per cent had changed their behaviour and a tenth had missed school because of online violence. These numbers also help to back up many of the observations...
Peter Fox: ...support available to residents to prevent or relieve homelessness. This is intended to help them secure housing, which, of course, is an important platform to enable families to find a job and educational opportunities. However, it seems that there are some unintended barriers within the scheme that may prevent people from securing a home. There appears to be a potentially lengthy...
Peter Fox: ...on the subject of consequential funding, could you explain how you are planning to allocate this in the upcoming budget? For example, will you direct the majority of further support for health and education and local government sectors, which, as you know, are under significant strain at the moment, or are you planning to spread the additional funding more evenly across departments? ...
