7. How does the First Minister plan to utilise additional funding for Wales resulting from the Autumn Statement? OAQ(5)0296(FM)

Our focus will be on restoring in part the previous cuts to our capital budget imposed by the UK Government and delivering our investment priorities as set out in ‘Taking Wales Forward’.

Thank you. First Minister, the autumn statement will deliver over £400 million over the next five years for infrastructure—good news. Will you make sure that all areas of Wales benefit from this extra funding, including rural areas like Monmouthshire, my constituency, which receives one of the lowest local government settlements but which would really benefit from additional investment in infrastructure projects and projects like the Cardiff city deal and the south Wales metro?

Monmouthshire is part of both projects, of course. Monmouthshire is an active part of the Cardiff capital region deal, and certainly the leader of Monmouthshire has been somebody who’s been very proactive in moving that deal forward, and also the metro. There are opportunities for Monmouthshire to benefit from the metro, particularly as we look to improved bus services and possibly light rail services into his constituency in the future.

The Government’s autumn statement demonstrated a very blasé attitude by the Tories towards an impending care crisis, and their failure to provide for our increasingly aging population means that there will be huge pressures now on the NHS. Will the First Minister make a commitment to work very closely with the Welsh Local Government Association to make sure that such a crisis does not occur in Wales?

Yes, absolutely. We already spend 6 per cent more per head on health and social services in Wales than is the case in England. We never saw the sense of taking money from social services in order to plug gaps in health funding, which is what England did. You can’t divorce one from the other, and we will continue to ensure that there is sufficient funding for both.

Some of the autumn statement money in England is going to be used to build hyperfast broadband capability through fibre to the premises. Isn’t there an opportunity here for us in Wales, as we begin to think beyond Superfast Cymru, instead of investing in a privately owned monopoly, which is highly problematical, as Ofcom’s decision today demonstrated, to create a publicly owned digital infrastructure network for Wales, something that his party leader at the UK level has recently called for for the UK?

I think that’s certainly worth exploring. The immediate objective is making sure that the current Superfast Cymru scheme is extended and completed in the middle of next year. Beyond that, of course, it’s right to say that we can’t sit back and say, ‘Well, that’s it. The technology will stay as it is for the next five years, 10 years or the next two years.’ So, yes, it is hugely important to continue to invest in greater bandwidth and greater speeds, of course, as far as broadband is concerned and we’ll continue to consider that.