Thank you, Presiding Officer. I hope that this will lead to a great many statements of this kind and I’m very pleased to be making this statement today. I welcome the wisdom of the Business Committee to enable committee Chairs to inform the Chamber of their committee’s work and priorities. As it is the start of a new Assembly term, and the Finance Committee has been busy setting out its work programme, this is an opportunity for me to share our thinking with you.

This is both an exciting and challenging time for Wales with fiscal devolution and new budgetary processes. Just last week, the committee met with its key stakeholders to discuss these challenges and to look at our aspirations for the future.

One of the main roles of the Finance Committee is to consider the draft budget and how fiscal devolution to Wales is going to impact on how we do this. This year’s budget is due to be published on 18 October and we have already held a consultation, which is closing today. However, as the consultation has been issued prior to stakeholders having sight of the actual spending plans, we also intend to launch a dialogue that will allow interested parties to convey their views via the Dialogue app. We hope that this, along with the formal consultation, will provide evidence for not just the Finance Committee, but the other committees during their budget scrutiny sessions. We will also be holding a stakeholder event in Merthyr Tydfil.

This will be the last year that the budget is considered under the current Standing Orders—hopefully—and just this morning in committee we considered a paper on the proposed changes. As Members will be aware and recall, from April 2018, Wales will be responsible for collecting and managing two new Welsh taxes, namely the land transaction tax and the landfill disposals tax. The Welsh Government will also have new borrowing powers for capital investment of up to £500 million, and borrowing powers of £500 million—an additional £500 million, that is—to manage short-term budgetary fluctuations arising from tax devolution. These changes will result in changes to our budgetary procedures, which I will return to shortly.

In the last Assembly, Royal Assent was granted to the Tax Collection and Management (Wales) Act 2016. This Act establishes the Welsh Revenue Authority, responsible for collecting and managing these devolved taxes. By now, the Land Transaction Tax and Anti-avoidance of Devolved Taxes (Wales) Bill has been introduced to the Assembly. We had our first scrutiny session in committee this morning on that Bill. Therefore, the autumn term will be very busy for the committee as it scrutinises this technical and complex Bill, which I am pleased to tell the Assembly is the longest piece of legislation to be introduced into the Assembly so far. The Bill will impact on a great number of the Welsh public, so our engagement will be vital to ensure that it is clear, robust and workable as a piece of legislation shaped for the needs of Wales.

Many of the key stakeholders for this inquiry are from professional and legal backgrounds. So, the committee will be hosting a roundtable CPD accredited event with a variety of professional organisations, institutions, law firms and those from the tax and conveyancing fields to discuss the implications of the Bill, as well as making a general call for evidence, which was issued last week.

These taxation Bills will lead to revenue raising powers for the Welsh Government, which leads me to one of our key priorities for this coming period, which is to consider changes to the budget process in order to deal with these new fiscal developments and to ensure that funding arrangements are suited to Welsh circumstances and priorities. In preparation for these changes, the fourth Assembly’s Finance Committee undertook work to consider a future budget process.

A new budget process in required in readiness for the draft budget for 2018-19. The committee will begin scrutinising that budget next autumn. It’s crucial that the Assembly has robust processes in place to scrutinise the Welsh Government’s plans. Assembly officials have been meeting regularly with Welsh Government officials to discuss options for an interim non-statutory budget process and protocol, which would be achieved via changes to Standing Orders—hopefully—and by updating the existing protocol between the Finance Committee and the Welsh Government.

In considering this process, we hope to develop a model that maximises time for meaningful scrutiny of Welsh Government spending, taxation and borrowing plans by the Finance Committee, other relevant committees and the public. We have also aimed to ensure that delivery partners have certainty of funding available at the earliest possible opportunity.

This work on fiscal devolution means that it is an exciting time for the Finance Committee and, hopefully, for the Assembly as a whole. We hope that the Wales Bill will allow us to put our budgetary procedures on a statutory footing with an annual budget Bill, which is a further step in the Assembly’s evolution to being our Parliament.