The following amendment has been selected: amendment 1 in the name of Paul Davies.

We now turn to the debate on the draft budget 2017-18, and I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government to move the motion. Mark Drakeford.

Motion NDM6179 Jane Hutt

To propose that the National Assembly for Wales, in accordance with Standing Order 20.12:

Notes the Draft Budget for the financial year 2017-2018 laid in the Table Office by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government on 18 October 2016.

Motion moved.

Diolch yn fawr, Ddirprwy Lywydd. I move the Welsh Government’s draft budget before the National Assembly.

We live in the most sustained adverse economic conditions faced for many generations, but even in this age of austerity, this has been a budget created under peculiarly testing circumstances. I’m grateful to the Finance Committee for the recognition in its report on the draft budget, published last week, that this has been an exercise framed in uncertainty. Certainly it has been one where planning for the future has been constrained by events, partially within Wales, but more significantly still, beyond our own boundaries. The Welsh Government’s usual budget cycle begins in March every year, but in 2016, the election of a new National Assembly in May, the formation of a minority administration, the ensuing agreement with Plaid Cymru to discuss key aspects of our programme over the summer months, have all produced an inevitable impact on our budget preparations. Beyond Wales, the European referendum result, the formation of the new administration in Westminster, the incoming Chancellor’s decision to formulate a fiscal reset and to delay that announcement until the autumn statement on 23 November, combined to shroud our own planning in uncertainty.

Nevertheless, Dirprwy Lywydd, my own ambition throughout the summer was to lay a budget of more than one year’s duration. I was then, and continue now, to be alert to the case that our partner organisations make, that planning is aided by longer budget periods. By September, however, it was clear that the lack of clarity about the revenue resources available to the National Assembly beyond 2017-18 meant that this ambition would not be possible. The budget before Members today therefore sets out revenue spending plans for one year, but capital budgets for four years ahead.

Dirprwy Lywydd, as a result of the work of my immediate predecessor, Jane Hutt, there has been an increasingly sophisticated focus on equality impacts in the budget round, and in the alignment of policy priorities and spending allocations. This draft budget draws heavily on the legacy of that work, both in individual departments and centrally. But while this year’s budget has been developed on a truncated timetable, I want to be clear that there is more we can and will do to apply these equality principles over the longer timetable, which will be available for budget planning next year.

This draft budget, Dirprwy Lywydd, is both a first and a last of its kind, and I want to say something on both counts. This is the first budget to be shaped by the passing of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, placed on the statute book by the fourth Assembly. I accept the views expressed during the scrutiny process, but at this point in time the impact of the Act is more evolutionary than complete. Nevertheless, the Act is there to be seen in the alignment of individual spending decisions with the five ways of working and the seven goals that it sets out. I do intend to introduce changes next year to the internal budget preparations that I undertake with Cabinet colleagues and others, to ensure that the Act goes on making a growing impact on our budget processes and outcomes. In a world of shrinking resource, growing demands and sharply competing priorities, however, no-one should believe that the Act provides a simplistic blueprint through which all tensions can be resolved. We are at the start of the journey that the Act provides, and more can and will be done to use it in next year’s budget making.

If this is the first year of the well-being of future generations Act, this is the last draft budget before the National Assembly before we become responsible for raising taxes in Wales. Provided the necessary legislation is approved by Assembly Members, in next year’s budget round, the finance Minister will be responsible for proposing the rates and bands for land transaction tax, and for the implementation detail of land disposals tax. I believe that this will change the nature of the scrutiny of future budgets. When the Chair of the Finance Committee made his introductory statement to the Assembly, he said that in future there would be a need to make changes to the budget process in order to deal with these new fiscal developments, with a new focus by the Finance Committee on Welsh Government’s spending, taxation and borrowing plans. I agree with the conclusions that he drew.

Turning back to this budget, I don’t intend to repeat what I said when I made my statement here on the floor of the Assembly on 18 October. This budget is very deliberately a budget for stability and ambition: stability in its efforts to ward off the worst impacts of revenue cuts to the Welsh Government’s budget over this term, and in providing longer term certainty for capital planning; ambitious because of the way we are investing in all our headline commitments as set out in the programme for government. This will help us to navigate through the treacherously difficult times in which we live, helping us to invest in growth and prosperity for all.

So, I repeat, Dirprwy Lywydd, what I have said many times in this Chamber and beyond since the budget was first laid: this budget provides a temporary period of relief from the UK Government’s worst impacts of austerity. We must, therefore, use this period to plan now for the tougher times and the more difficult choices that lie ahead.

The Presiding Officer took the Chair.

The Finance Committee says in its report, that it found too little evidence of this planning taking place. Maybe in the first weeks after the budget was laid, this was understandable, but I am clear that in the months ahead this challenge really must be grasped. As to the specific recommendations made in the committee’s report, I look forward to responding to them formally and fully in advance of the debate on the final budget in the new year. Today, I’m glad to welcome the constructive spirit of those recommendations, and to recognise the significance of the issues highlighted in them; from the revenue consequences of capital borrowing, to the impact of the decision to leave the European Union on future resources available to Wales.

Now, the context for all of this has become all the more pressing, Llywydd, in the light of the autumn statement of 23 November. In terms of capital investment, I recognise the steps the Chancellor has taken and the consequentials that will flow for capital investment in Wales. I am determined that we will make the best possible use of these funding opportunities, and I am in discussion with my Cabinet colleagues and others about how this new investment can be put to work for Wales. It is to be simply truthful, however, rather than churlish, to point out, as the First Minister did earlier this afternoon, that the effect of the autumn statement is to make our capital budget only 21 per cent lower in 2019 than it was in 2009. It only goes some way, then, to fill the hole that the Chancellor’s predecessor dug for Wales. Now, all the decisions about allocating this additional capital will be made in time for them to be reflected in the final budget when it is laid on 20 December, and therefore well before it will be debated in January.

On the revenue side, the autumn statement was bitterly disappointing. In advance of the statement, I joined the finance Ministers of Scotland and Northern Ireland in calling on the Chancellor to end the self-defeating policies of austerity that have done so much to damage the economic prospects and the social fabric of our nation. But, offered the chance to do so, the Chancellor conspicuously failed. To the consternation of colleagues in the English NHS, and to the bitter criticism of many Conservative leaders of English local authorities, the autumn statement provided not a single penny piece for those vital services in health and social care. For everything we do in Wales, with the needs of an ageing population, and with inflation rising, we have £35.8 million extra to invest in public services over the whole of the next four years, and £20 million of that had already been announced. Moreover, and alarmingly, the autumn statement confirmed that the Chancellor intends to go ahead with £3.5 billion-worth of revenue cuts in 2019-20, which by itself could wipe out, by a multiple of between three and six times, the whole of the additional revenue provided to Wales for four whole years in the autumn statement.

Now, Llywydd, this is an administration without a majority. As such, we entered into a set of arrangements with Plaid Cymru to work together in the Welsh national interest on a series of matters, including securing a budget for Wales. The draft budget laid on 18 October reflected the results of considerable discussions and negotiations over the summer months. These discussions have continued since the draft budget was published and will resume again next week. The discussions are inevitably challenging, but I believe have been constructive. I have been grateful to Adam Price and his team for the level and nature of their participation in those discussions and for the common ground we have been able to identify as a result. Llywydd, we heard earlier this afternoon of the enthusiasm of the Conservative party for recycling, and such is their devotion to it that they have presented the identical amendment to this budget that they proposed last year, before losing May’s election. We will match their consistency by voting against it today. We do so, Llywydd, because this is a budget that matches up to all our commitments, it is a budget that protects our public services, invests in jobs and growth, and provides a moment to prepare ahead. I commend it to the Assembly.

I call on the Chair of the Finance Committee, Simon Thomas.

Thank you, Presiding Officer, and thank you to the Cabinet Secretary for setting out the context for the draft budget before us this afternoon. On behalf of the Finance Committee, I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed their views to assist us in undertaking this important work of scrutinising the draft budget. We only had a little time to focus on this work, and therefore we’re particularly pleased that, this time, we’ve had the opportunity to use informal methods, such as holding an online conversation and an event for stakeholders outside the Assembly—and outside Cardiff, indeed—as well as gathering evidence formally in the usual manner. This allowed people to discuss the draft budget openly and honestly, and we hope that we can build on these links in future to ensure that there is a way to feed a wide variety of comments into the committee’s work, including the work of scrutinising the budget. The committee is grateful to everyone who contributed to our work. We want to work with the Cabinet Secretary to expand on this principle of participatory budgeting as the process develops.

The committee report includes a number of recommendations that are very wide-ranging. We recommend very strongly that the Welsh Government should consider and accept all of these findings and recommendations, and I’m very pleased that the Cabinet Secretary has noted that he is at least seriously considering all of the recommendations made. There is much that I’d like to say for the whole Assembly, as we prepare to have taxation powers and the changes that the Cabinet Secretary laid out in opening this debate. This draft budget is a better settlement than many expected, and the comments that we’ve received reflected this. However, it’s clear from what the Cabinet Secretary told the committee, and what he’s just said today, that organisations should be using this settlement to prepare for much tougher times ahead. But, despite this, we’re concerned that we’ve seen very little evidence of such preparation taking place, and we would urge organisations, particularly the health service and local government, to think ahead and put steps in place to enable them to manage with less in future years. This is particularly of concern given the Institute of Fiscal Studies’s prediction that the Welsh Government’s budget could be cut by 3.2 per cent in real terms over the next three years. This, coupled with the likely loss of EU grants, would see further cuts falling on local government, and so early preparation to mitigate funding decreases will be vital.

With regard to the national health service, the committee was disappointed that some health boards do not yet have approved three-year integrated plans in place, even though it’s a statutory requirement of them to prepare these since the National Health Service Finance (Wales) Act came into force in April 2014. The fact that these plans haven’t been approved for all health boards is a cause of concern. It was also a concern for the previous Finance Committee in the fourth Assembly, and that’s a disappointment for us. We will give this further consideration next year. Furthermore, to respond to the pressures on the health service now and in future, we’ve noted that the scale of transformation needs to be faster and it must be much more ambitious. So, we’ve recommended that future draft budgets should be able to demonstrate how allocations support investment in prevention work and transformation of services.

Turning to the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, now that the provisions of this Act have come into force, the committee did expect to see how the allocations made in the draft budget had been influenced by the requirements of that Act. However, we heard from stakeholders directly, and from other committees, that there’s very little information in the published budget documentation to demonstrate how the Act has impacted upon allocations. We’ve therefore expressed our disappointment at the lack of progress made by the Welsh Government in reflecting how budget allocations have been influenced by the Act. In particular, we were very disappointed to hear that some stakeholders viewed the previous draft budget as being easier to link to the Act than this one. Surely that wasn’t the intention. We think that this was a missed opportunity for the Welsh Government to demonstrate the leadership required to bring about the transformational change needed to embed the requirements of the Act as an integral part of policy decisions. I was very pleased to hear the comments of the Cabinet Secretary in opening this debate, which suggested to me that he at least, if he doesn’t acknowledge this argument, acknowledges that a debate is needed within the Government on this particular issue. We would hope to see a quantifiable improvement on this in the draft budget next year, and we’ve recommended that the Government use a strategic integrated impact assessment tool to identify how the Act influences the draft budget in future. As I said, it’s clear that the Cabinet Secretary does want to look at this and will, hopefully, improve the process.

We know that, from April 2018, the Welsh Government will have increased powers in relation to taxation and borrowing, and, as such, the committee’s role will change, as will the role of the Assembly. Although we welcome the Cabinet Secretary’s openness about the Government’s commitments in relation to borrowing, we note that detail on borrowing in the draft budget documentation, on issues such as borrowing, debt, repayment, and non-domestic rates, was lacking. We would expect to see a drastic improvement on this in next year’s draft budget, as the Assembly itself, of course, develops new ways of scrutinising the budget.

The Assembly and the Welsh public deserve a full picture of the Government’s budgetary performance, based perhaps on the famous red book that we have in Westminster. We must also remember that the autumn statement has changed the timing of the budget in Westminster from spring to autumn, and the Assembly will have to respond appropriately to that process.

Other committees wrote to us to highlight the key issues from their scrutiny sessions with the respective Cabinet Secretaries, and we’ve outlined these in our report, particularly those on the value for money of the Welsh Government’s draft budget allocations. There are too many to mention today, but I’d like to draw the Assembly’s attention to one in particular, which is the concern of the Climate Change, Energy and Rural Affairs Committee about the potential effects of cuts in the budget for flood prevention and climate change. The autumn statement was made following our scrutiny of the draft budget, and the Government will surely want to re-emphasise the need for capital allocations in this area in the light of that statement. We will track responses from the Welsh Government to the individual committees, and we ask those committees to continue to pursue the value-for-money aspect during their in-year financial scrutiny.

I would like to again thank everyone who has contributed to this scrutiny process. As a committee, we are acutely aware that the time available for draft budget scrutiny is short, and we are very grateful to everyone for their valuable contributions. I now look forward to hearing more political comments with regard to the draft budget.

I have selected the amendment to the motion and I call on Nick Ramsay to move the amendment tabled in the name of Paul Davies. Nick Ramsay.

Amendment 1—Paul Davies

Delete all and replace with:

To propose that the National Assembly for Wales:

Does not believe the Welsh Government's draft Budget 2017-18 meets the needs of the Welsh people.

Amendment 1 moved.

Diolch. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I’m pleased to contribute to this debate today and to move the amendment in the name of Paul Davies. It’s not an identical amendment to last year’s draft budget, Cabinet Secretary—I did actually change the year. [Laughter.] Some of the problems that that amendment addressed are still there, but it is a recent amendment.

Can I concur with many of the comments made by the Chair of the Finance Committee? We appreciate the difficulty that the timing of the autumn statement has caused for the Cabinet Secretary and his team. It has also caused headaches for the Finance Committee, as the Chair has alluded to, but these are headaches that we have got used to over recent years. On the bright side, the autumn statement will deliver an extra £436 million, thereabouts, of capital funding between 2016 and 2021 on capital projects as a result of extra spending on transport in England—infrastructure in England. We all know we need to invest in our infrastructure to grow our economy, so this additional funding is to be welcomed.

Recommendation 1 of the Finance Committee report recommends that:

‘In future years the draft budget…should clearly demonstrate how the programme for government has informed and driven the budget setting process’.

As things stand, you have to say that those links are simply not there. As for the integration with future generations legislation, well, don’t even go there. There are very real concerns about how that piece of legislation is going to pull its weight and these were voiced on the committee. At the end of the day, it isn’t just about legislation and budgeting. We need to see real sustainable results on the ground and all our efforts should be geared towards that.

As with previous draft budgets that have been brought forward in this Chamber, many Members are prone to lambasting the UK Government cuts—and they are tough; there is no getting away from that. But, I think that, too often, criticism is made in this Chamber about those cuts without sufficient weight being given to why the cuts were originally considered necessary and, indeed, the huge level of borrowing that the previous Government—and, indeed, the current one—was left with, which had to be dealt with. The previous finance Secretary here has herself admitted that borrowing had to be dealt with.

Now, Government is all about priorities and making do within the constraints set, but as the Cabinet Secretary has mentioned, those constraints are set to be relaxed; this budget will be the last to cover a period in which the Welsh Government does not have tax powers or significant borrowing powers. Given that the devolution of tax is now a little over a year away, we might have expected some recognition of this and an indication of how tax will be used as a tool to support the programme for government. The fact that we haven’t had that, or an indication of that, is, I think, symptomatic of a deeper issue surrounding forward planning and the problems associated with developing multi-year budgets.

I appreciate that here, it’s not just a question of the Welsh Government planning better for the future. The UK as a whole needs to do that as well. We need a fiscal framework. I know the Cabinet Secretary shares these views; other parties do, as well. It would be easier for the Welsh Government to plan if settlements from the Treasury were better insulated against financial shocks, particularly with the devolution of tax powers. Future reductions in the block grant must be properly indexed and appropriate. We can’t afford to get this wrong.

Turning to the largest part of the draft budget, the health budget is indeed getting an injection of resourcing, and whilst we welcome any extra resources for the NHS, we should not forget that we are still playing catch-up from the decisions not to protect the health budget in real terms between 2011 and 2016, at a time when Barnett consequentials were coming to Wales as a result of the UK Government’s protection of the English budget.

I know that many AMs here don’t like us talking about the previous Assembly’s real-terms cuts to the health budget, but I do think that we need to take a balanced view of this. I’m prepared to take a balanced view of this budget, if other Members are as well. Whilst we welcome the move towards a new treatment fund—that is welcomed—I think it’s a shame that the Government didn’t heed Welsh Conservative calls for a cancer treatment fund all those years ago when our constituents were calling for equity with England and tens of thousands of people across Wales were signing petitions registering their concerns—

Will you give way?

In a moment, I will.

I had constituents at their tethers’ end considering moving across the border from my constituency to access life-lengthening medication.

Thank you for giving way. Would the Member accept that the problem with a cancer treatment fund is that it ignores the fact that many other people suffer from illnesses that also require investment and innovation and so on, and that that is a barrier to one of the things that we’ve tried to achieve through these negotiations? [Interruption.]

I’ve already said that I welcome a treatment fund; I just think it’s a shame that we are playing catch-up from a number of years ago, when our constituents—and not just mine; I’m sure constituents in your area, Rhun, in Ynys Môn were also calling for a cancer treatment fund. It is one of the biggest killers in Wales and I just think it’s a shame that we didn’t take that action at that time, but I’m willing to accept that we do now have a treatment fund. I just think we could’ve got out of the blocks a little bit earlier, and I think, probably, in your heart of hearts, you agree with that as well, Rhun.

We need more information on where health funding is going. Getting data from the NHS has always been tricky to say the least. Is the additional funding really going to go on improving the health service and building for the future, rather than simply plugging and writing off holes in the budget? As I said earlier, Cabinet Secretary, we’re playing catch-up here and we shouldn’t forget that.

Turning to education, earlier this afternoon, we had a statement on the poor PISA results. Okay, I appreciate that these results are very recently published, but I think it is reasonable to ask how this budget will address the concerns raised in that statement. Going in the right direction is not good enough. There can be no clearer sign of how serious this Assembly takes its obligations to future generations than what we do to raise educational standards in this country, and to reach the standards required. As paragraph 4.35 of the draft budget proposals reminds us,

‘Education plays a fundamental role in our development as individuals and is the foundation of a strong and vibrant economy.’

If I can turn to and, indeed, warmly welcome the abandonment of the flawed plans to reform local government in Wales, we in the Welsh Conservatives believe this will avoid wasting a huge sum of money—money that can be invested where it should be: on the front line, in public services, where people would expect it to be invested. I do, of course, have an issue with sharing out of the local government budget itself. I’ve made those concerns well known in this Chamber during many statements and debates. The old formula is still being relied on. As we know, it penalises rural local authorities, like mine in Monmouthshire—consistently at the bottom of the pile of funding. There is one small section in the draft budget on rural issues. I think it’s on page 55, relating to food and drink and supply chains. Good as far as it goes: it may proclaim an increase in funding to local government, but that is just half the battle. It needs to be distributed fairly, recognising the greater costs of delivering services across a sparsely populated rural area.

Cabinet Secretary, sustainability is at the heart of the Assembly’s constitution, but there is a perception out there that we often talk the talk without always walking the walk. If the Welsh Government is going to require other organisations to demonstrate three-year financial planning, then it has to make more of an effort to do this itself as part of a modernisation of the Welsh Government budget process. We talked earlier about the need to modernise the Assembly’s budget process. The Welsh Government needs to do that as well.

In conclusion, Presiding Officer, we need more joined-up thinking. How does this budget deliver on Welsh Government objectives over the medium term? How does it prepare us for the changes and the challenges ahead? How does it deliver our goal of long-term sustainability?

Whilst good in parts, and providing much-needed but ultimately—as the Cabinet Secretary himself alluded to—short-term relief for some of our public services, this is a temporary fix. To paraphrase the words of the late Sir Robin Day, it’s a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ budget. This is why we do not feel that this budget meets the needs of the people of Wales.

I will come to the remarks of the Cabinet Secretary in a second, but listening to the spokesperson of the Conservative Party, I was put in mind of one of those choice quotes of John Maynard Keynes who, in an earlier time of economic turbulence, said:

‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’

He was referring to the necessity of cuts as a practical necessity in these times that we live in. The world has moved on since then. I don’t know whether you had Patrick Minford as a poster on your wall as a teenager. Maybe you did. Maybe you worshipped the monetarist. But look, we live in an age when the Governor of the Bank of England—not an institution that, over its history, has cared much about issues like inequality and the position of the working class—has just referred to the lost decade, comparing us to the 1860s. Mario Draghi, of all people, the chair of the European Central Bank, has just called for an EU-wide fiscal stimulus. The European Commission put a proposal across the EU, saying that unless we get fiscal expansion, then we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. The President-elect of the United States—no political friend of mine; no soft-hearted liberal—has called for a massive fiscal expansion in the United States of America. I’ll gladly give way to the Member.

Thank you. I’m not going to tell you what posters I had on my wall in my bedroom as a teenager, but they certainly weren’t of economists. I hear what you’re saying, Adam, but are you honestly saying that you do not believe that any cuts were necessary at all? Because if you are saying that, then that is completely preposterous. You have to believe in running an economy fiscally reasonably and sustainably. To say that no cuts were necessary—well, come on, that’s a fraud.

I have some very simple and bad news for him: yes, we have huge debt in the public sector, but has he looked at the state of corporate debt in the private sector? The entire economy of the western world is indebted. So, what is he suggesting? That we all cut all economic activity, and that we go back to ground zero? Re-read Keynes by all means. We are back in the same situation where collapsing trust and economic confidence has left us in the position where there is only one lever left, and it is the lever held by people like us who are elected to represent the public. Unless governments act across the western world, then we are all condemned to a future, politically and economically, that no-one—not one of us, I presume—would want to see.

Let’s turn to the budget. I have sympathy with the Cabinet Secretary, because he has to deal within the constraints that are set upon him in this situation where we do not have fiscal and economic sovereignty to the extent that this party would like to see. So, that is the backdrop, unfortunately, to our discussions here, and as we gather and gain political and fiscal autonomy then we will be able to do more in the future.

It was a pleasure to work with him in this curious form of political cohabitation that we’ve invented between our two parties, as a governing party and an opposition party, to do what is right in the interests of the people of Wales. We have our disagreements, and we certainly continue to discuss those areas of disagreement. But it was good to be able to agree support, particularly for sectors, in this year where, as he has said, it’s about creating, possibly, a breathing space in order for us to put in place a platform for some of the more radical change that will be necessary over the years ahead. We’re looking particularly in the Plaid Cymru agreement at those sectors that have had serial cuts over many years: higher education; further education, which is underfunded; the arts sector; local government, with the first cash rise since 2013-14; and mental health spending, where I know there is consensus across the Assembly that it is a sector that has been underfunded compared to its importance over many years. So, it was good to put those in place through the agreement between us.

In pooling our ideas, I think we were able to create a better budget. I want to see the whole of this Assembly, actually, being able to do that role more effectively than it has hitherto, and that’s why I welcome the recommendations from the Finance Committee. We collated, with the Government’s help, all the different items—the main expenditure groups, the spending programme areas, the actions, the budget, the BELs, the budget expenditure lines—yes, about 7,000 of them, or something like that. It should have been a red file—it’s a blue file. It could be a red book, maybe. But you won’t find this available anywhere at the moment. This should be given to every Assembly Member, of opposition parties and governing parties, so you can look through each of these individual budget expenditure lines. Otherwise, we’re not able to do our job to the best of our ability.

I’m particularly looking forward, as the Cabinet Secretary has said—and, indeed, the Chair of the Finance Committee—we live in a time of great challenge, with rising demand, huge fiscal constraints, and opportunities in terms of new technology like big data, for example. We need to look at creating a longer-term budgetary framework for the public sector bodies that rely on the budget. So, a three-year budget I think is something worth welcoming. But certainly, we need to have the information available in a more transparent form than is currently the case, and we should look at broader innovations about the way we set the budget.

They say that journalism is the first draft of history. There’s a paucity of journalism in Wales. Maybe the Welsh budget, actually, is the first draft, because of the central importance of the Welsh Government in shaping our future as a nation. Fifty years ago in the United States, they innovated in budget making through programme budgeting, and actually it relates to the first recommendation of the Finance Committee. Alongside the figures on expenditure, we should have figures on what we’re trying to achieve, on outcomes. They put the two together. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, did some things I wouldn’t agree with, but he did some good things as well, and actually had a bit of a Damascene conversion at the end. But one of the excellent things he did was say, ‘The only way Congress can judge a budget is actually having the data on inputs and outputs set out at the same time’. There’s a reference, I think, in one of the committee’s reports, to the pupil deprivation grant—absolutely laudable in terms of its objectives, but is it achieving those objectives and how do we actually evaluate value for money? Again, maybe there’s a different way that we can look at budget making in total. We talk about moving away from silo Government, don’t we? We’ve talked about a joined-up Government et cetera for a decade and more. Yet, this a monument to silo thinking, isn’t it? It’s all done on a departmental basis.

Would it be possible to do a cross-departmental budget where we actually have main expenditure groups that are about innovation, which look at creating an innovation fund that moves across all the departments? Could we look at other areas like prevention, which is also mentioned in the Finance Committee’s report? We all know this, don’t we, that actually investing in early years intervention for children and young people saves us money in the long term, certainly in the health service, as referred to in the Finance Committee’s report? Why don’t we have prevention as one of our main expenditure groups, rather than the departmental focus that we have?

I welcome the fact that, through our discussions, we’re looking at a participatory budget, involving the citizens, user engagement, co-production—a word that I think Leighton Andrews tried to ban. But ultimately, if we’re going to achieve more with the taxpayers’ pound, we can only do that with actually drawing other people, citizens, companies and sectors in to co-delivering some of our objectives as well.

So, I would urge that we take a different look at the way that we currently go about budget setting and we involve not just other Members in this place but the citizens as well. We would like to see in the final budget, particularly as referred to in one of the committee’s reports, and as Simon Thomas has already raised, the issue of capital funding for flooding and certainly business rates. We’ve made the case many, many times, I think, for additional relief, particularly as a result of the revaluation. On housing, could we look, as the UK Government is doing, at modular housing as a means of accelerating housing development? Finally, on local transport—seeing on social media people right across Wales complaining about the overcrowding on our trains and also the problems in some parts of Wales with local bus services as well—could we make that a priority as we move from this draft budget to the final budget statement?

We are around seven years into a period of economic recovery, albeit from an absolutely terrible recession. There’s been substantial growth in the overall UK and Welsh economies. Unemployment is really very low by historical comparisons, at least over the last 30 years, in both Wales and the UK. The budget deficit at a UK level is still approaching £70 billion, approximately 4 per cent of GDP. Yet, the majority of people in this Assembly appear to speak as if there could be a great new borrowing binge, as if austerity is a choice rather than a necessity. If at this stage of the economic cycle you are still borrowing 4 per cent of GDP, then the idea that you can go on a borrowing binge from here is, I think, for the birds. Actually, the only reason, responding to Adam Price, that we’ve been able to sustain the situation is because £425 billion of that borrowing has been cancelled, in effect, by the Bank of England. Yet, we cannot presume that that loose monetary policy of a 0.25 per cent bank rate and £425 billion of quantitative easing is going to continue. And when it reverses, which I believe may be sooner than people in the main expect, then it is going to be very difficult to carry on borrowing at this level. We’ve seen, in the last month or two, that long-term interest rates have increased by about a third compared to where they were. And that will, over time, flow through into budgeting on a UK basis and, through that, to this Assembly.

I speak with relative modesty and I don’t plan a great partisan spiel today. It’s my first year within the budgeting process of this Assembly and, as the finance Minister has said, the system is changing. I have some experience of budgeting at a council and at a police authority level, and, indeed, to the extent it happens there at all, at Westminster, but I don’t want to presume from similarities that things are the same, because there are key and important distinctions.

I’m particularly disappointed to be informed that today we vote on a take-note motion on the draft budget, and then when the final budget comes to us in January, I am informed that there is simply an up-down vote on the motion, and the budget itself is unamendable. I think that’s disappointing—it reflects the situation at Westminster, but only since the 1930s. Prior to that, MPs could and did amend Government spending plans, and I think it would be a more healthy system if party groups or Ministers or Members were able to put amendments to the Government’s budget, and have votes in this place on whether they should be agreed or not. Another thing I find--

Will you give way?

Yes, I’m very happy to.

The Member makes an interesting point, which is that many other Commonwealth countries, for example, and federal countries do use that process, but they do have safeguards around it, particularly where extra expenditure is involved, and you don’t balance the budget with extra income. But he will have the opportunity to take that view forward as we do debate through the Business Committee and through the Assembly itself how we take forward a new look at the budget process.

Yes, and I look forward to working with the Chair of the Finance Committee and others on that. I think the proposal that any change in a budget line that were to be submitted as a motion should at the same time have an amendment as to either an increase in taxation or a reduction in spending which would counter that. But, subject to that, I think we would benefit from having that democratic process.

I’m also grateful to Simon Thomas and also to Nick Ramsey, both of whom have been generous with their time in explaining to me the particularities of the budget-setting process here, and also to the Cabinet Secretary who has been very forthcoming to the Finance Committee, both on the two Bills that we are considering, and on to this budget scrutiny that we have fitted within that.

One other area, I think, of challenge, to my understanding of how the process works here, and perhaps to others, is quite what this relationship is between Plaid and the Labour Party. I had understood that what had been agreed was that Plaid would allow the budget to go through—I’m still unclear as to whether that is abstention or support—in return for a series of specific changes to that budget that would be agreed by Plaid, for instance the £300,000 for looking at the Carmarthen to Aberystwyth railway and whether we can bring that back. I trust that Plaid will be as keen in monitoring how that money is being spent, and ensuring value for money, as they have been at agreeing it in the first place. But it seems that by doing that, they are allowing through quite a lot of other things in this budget that they got no sight of in advance, yet somehow are now associated with. And I felt that Adam Price’s speech was quite some way to defending the budget as a whole, rather than merely just the specific Plaid elements within it. I think we would all benefit from greater clarity as to how that relationship is working.

I also think the Finance Committee—I’m proud of the document that we’ve produced in a very short timescale. I’m not quite sure of the status of that document in this debate—it’s referred to as a supporting document. I wonder, actually, if this Assembly and Plenary were to vote on those recommendations whether they would be supported by the Assembly as a whole. We have had a cross-party agreement in committee, and I think that would strengthen the position further of the Assembly in the budget scrutiny process, and I look forward to the Cabinet Secretary telling us what, if any, parts of the budget he’s going to amend in response to those.

We have this Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, and as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out on whether this is an effective piece of legislation or is virtue signalling on a number of very worthy goals that aren’t then followed up and made to happen through the day-to-day process of government and legislation. So, I look forward to seeing changes that may or may not come in that area.

Overall, I would characterise the budget as a ‘steady as she goes’ budget—there’s a lot of budget lines where there’s no change to the spending. The Cabinet Secretary did find additional money for health, which we support. I’m most struck by the local government settlement, relative at least to the spending we see set by the UK Government largely for England, because it’s that local government area that seems to me to have less reductions in Wales, relative to the very, very sharp cuts that local councils in England have experienced, and the corollary of that is health having had cuts in Wales that it hasn’t faced in England. I know that some of that may reflect what is going on with social care and the NHS, and I think it’s sensible for the Government to consider that in the way it does, but, overall, the local government settlement looks vulnerable for future years. And in our Finance Committee report, we say that the

‘draft budget this year is a better settlement for many than was expected...organisations should be using this settlement to prepare for tougher times ahead, the Committee was concerned not to have seen evidence of this preparation taking place’.

And it cites particularly the health service and local government. But in local government, we’ve got elections in May, and the suspicion has to be that there are going to be severe cuts in local government that may be put off until next year and, rather than planning for those reductions now, local governments are concentrating on pump-priming for the council elections in May and we will then see severe reductions in the year or two to follow that that might well have been better planned. For the health service, I’m disappointed to see that we have this statutory requirement for three-year budgeting, we have all these interest groups and partner organisations coming to us and saying they want to plan for the long term, yet several of these health organisations haven’t actually set those three-year budgets, as required by statute.

We have seen these very significant—between 35 and 40 per cent, depending on which year you look at—cuts to the capital budget for climate change projects. I remember being assailed quite aggressively by Carl Sargeant prior to the election on how UKIP wanted to cut this budget, and yet the Government comes back and in the first budget cuts it by over a third. One must admit to being somewhat perplexed. One questions the Cabinet Secretary and is told, ‘Actually, this isn’t going to affect the climate change goals or objectives or what the Government’s going to achieve in this field.’ In which case, why was this money being spent under the climate change area, if it wasn’t actually required to meet those goals? I wonder if these climate change capital projects will be like the higher education budget, perhaps, was last year, and we may see substantive parts of that put back following what we’ve learned in the autumn statement.

I’d like to be assured that what’s happening in terms of energy efficiency and fuel poverty is well connected between the energy companies’ schemes, Nest, and what the Welsh Government is doing, and similarly with local government and its responsibilities in flood protection. And I think it would be good if we looked at these particular schemes on their merits and subjected them to good forensic scrutiny, rather than simply because they’re described as climate change projects having them extolled by the Government as self-evidently good or, indeed, criticised by others as if they weren’t. We should look at their merits, and I think it’s very, very important we get the BELs, the budget expenditure lines, out there early on. It really is unsatisfactory to have very, very broad budgets announced and then to find out significantly later that, actually, the picture is very, very different than it appeared because of what is going on at that level. I really think it would benefit the overall budget process, public scrutiny and democratic involvement in Wales if those BELs were announced at the same time as the draft budget, in order that people can work for proper budget scrutiny and effect. I’m grateful to the Cabinet Secretary and for the time, Llywydd.

This is the sixth budget I have spoken on in the Senedd. Unfortunately, they have all been made against the austerity agenda of first the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Westminster Government and now a Conservative Government. How long will the austerity path be followed until it suddenly dawns on the Government that it is not working? As Adam Price said earlier, this is the first lost decade of economic growth since the 1860s. That was the time of Disraeli and Gladstone, and Disraeli and Gladstone as young men. [Interruption.] No, I’ll help Neil Hamilton: Palmerston was there at the beginning, Disraeli and Gladstone were there at the end. Or is this austerity agenda just a fig leaf to hide the desire of the Conservatives to shrink the public sector? Where the state cannot be removed completely, they find a way, such as academy schools in England, where the private sector can make money out of it.

Turning to the budget before us, health continues on its journey towards 50 per cent of the Welsh revenue budget; this time next year, I predict it will actually exceed 50 per cent of the Welsh revenue budget. I think it’s running at 49 per cent this year. Health is by far the most important service that the Welsh Government provides, but money on health must be used to its best effect. I remain highly sceptical of the current health board structure, which does not seem to me to be based on natural health boundaries. Some questions on health need addressing: how much does it cost for agency staff? Why is there not an all-Wales medicines service so that if medicines are about to become out of date, they can be redeployed to a different hospital even if it’s in a different health board so as to avoid waste?

Will you take an intervention, Mike?

Certainly.

Thank you, I’m very grateful for your taking the intervention. It’s in relation, specifically, to the costs of agency staff. As you will know, the UK Government took action to put a cap on the cost of agency staff per hour. The Welsh Government decided not to follow suit. That’s costing our NHS millions of pounds every year. Do you share my view that the Welsh Government should reconsider its position?

I don’t share your view. What I would say is that if you put that cap on, you end up with wards running short of nurses, and you end up with hospitals short of doctors. The problem is we need agency staff. The challenge to the Welsh Government and the health service is to get to a situation where we don’t need agency staff because we’re fully staffed.

Why are you, as stated by a former health Minister, twice as likely to have your tonsils removed in Ynys Môn than you are in Wrexham, which are both part of the same health board? Why does the cost of an operation such as cataracts vary so much between different hospitals? We recently heard reported that the cost of locum doctors in Wales exceeds £137 million—an increase from £64 million in the previous year. The highest paid locum, according to the newspapers, received £183,000 last year. We need a system where we get more doctors in, and I put my cards on the table that I believe in salaried GPs.

Why are medical interventions that do no good for the patient still taking place? The auditor general reported on this practice, as have NICE. How many patients overnight does a minor injuries unit need to see for it to be kept open overnight? Currently, the answer to that is three.

We as a committee of the Assembly scrutinised the Cabinet Secretary for health and the Cabinet Secretary for finance as to who engages in the in-depth scrutiny of health board expenditure, not over accuracy and legality, but over efficiency and effectiveness.

Whilst people generally have their major health needs during the last 12 to 24 months of their lives, they can need social care for up to 40 years, with the level and complexity of care increasing as people age, often ending up with a residential care package having to be paid for by the local council. It is also of no surprise that those living in inadequate housing tend to have greater health needs. Health is also a lifestyle. Exercising facilities run by local authorities, and fitness, diet and smoking cessation schemes run by Communities First all help to improve the health of people in Wales.

While the autumn statement has added additional capital expenditure to the Welsh Government’s budget, according to my calculation it still has not even taken us back to 2008 expenditure in real terms. Additional capital expenditure would benefit the Welsh economy. Remember that the capital expenditure that Ed Balls called for and that George Osborne described as wrecking the recovery has now been brought forward by Philip Hammond. It’s very pleasing that they’ve almost learned.

Can I just say something relating to this idea that you have to keep on cutting to make austerity for things to work? No, you grow your economy. You increase your tax take by growing the economy. You get more people working; not as we have at the moment, working limited hours and zero hours and short-term contract hours, but you actually get them working full time and you get their salaries up. When that happens, the tax take goes up and people end up better off. Can I just say that, finally, capital expenditure is desperately needed for things as diverse as new schools and flood defences, even though the global warming deniers do not believe that we need the additional flood defences?

Six years ago, the Conservative-led UK Government inherited an economy on the brink of collapse, with the highest budget deficit in peacetime UK history. To rebuild shattered fiscal credibility, it had to take tough decisions. Austerity, defined as not having enough money, is therefore not a choice. As any debtor knows, you cannot start reducing debt until expenditure falls below income. If the Treasury had pursued faster deficit reduction, cuts would have been higher. In the real financial world, borrowers borrow but lenders set the terms. If the Treasury had pursued lower deficit reduction, higher cuts could have been imposed. Those who state otherwise are at best deluding themselves, at worst deluding the people.

The Welsh Government has rightly prioritised prevention and early intervention, but as this draft budget illustrates, it says one thing and does another. Although its budgets for prevention and early intervention and for voluntary sector support are key to the delivery of its policies, and although they represent just 1.5 per cent of the combined health and local government budgets, this Welsh Government has cut them again to over £7 million below their 2015-16 level. Rather than working smarter, this false economy will add additional costs to health and local government services many times higher than the short-sighted cuts imposed. So much for the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 promoting the involvement of people in the design and delivery of care and support services. So much for the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, making public bodies work better with people, with communities and each other, taking a joined-up approach. And so much for the Auditor General for Wales’s report, ‘A Picture of Public Services 2015’, which said,

‘there is now a much clearer recognition that previous approaches have not worked as intended and that radical change is required’,

‘public services must increasingly be delivered not to people, but with people…involving people in the design and delivery of services, recognising people’s own strengths and tailoring services accordingly.’

As the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, said,

‘While it is entirely appropriate to rescue the man or woman who has fallen into the sea, it is much better to tackle the roots of the individual’s problem at the top of the cliff from which they fell.’

Yet charities Carers Wales, Contact a Family Cymru and Learning Disability Wales are having to call for the Welsh Government to rethink its decision to cut the family fund by £5.5 million, stating it

‘Seems to have made their decision without considering the impact it would have on the most vulnerable families with disabled children.’

Adding, the reduction also seems to run counter to wider Welsh Government policy. In contrast, funding in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland has been maintained.

Of course, Labour’s Welsh Government has got form for this. When, in September 2014, it announced funding to support front-line advice services, Citizens Advice Cymru and Shelter Cymru, it shut out AdviceUK—the UK’s largest support network for free, independent advice centres, with 24 member organisations in Wales—denying people in crisis quick, emergency intervention and trapping them on waiting lists. Over the last year it has been the turn of organisations including Disability Wales and child contact centres in Wales, leading to poorer and more costly outcomes for people and families.

Despite calls by the Wales disability reference group for the devolved independent living fund to be administered in the voluntary sector with Scotland and Northern Ireland, Labour has given this to local government. When I raised concerns about the shortage of qualified nurses providing palliative care in the voluntary sector, identified by the charity Together for Short Lives, this was dismissed, as it was when I highlighted concerns raised by the north Wales safer communities board that too much was being spent on firefighting substance misuse problems and not enough on intervention and prevention, and when I criticised the 10 per cent cut to the third sector supporting communities and people budget, emphasising the crucial role the third sector plays in delivering quality services for less. Such cuts to ground-level support compromise the more user-led, preventative and cost-effective services that the third sector delivers when we should instead be transforming Wales’s public services by embedding co-production.

All too often, money washes over people and neighbourhoods rather than watering their roots. To provide better services more efficiently means taking powers out of the hands of government at local and national level, and sharing it with the people living and working on the front line. If you trust them, it will improve their lives and save money in the process.

I’ll refer to specific elements of this budget in relation to health. The agreement, of course, represents only a part of the wider budget. In that wider budget there are some decisions relating to health and social care that we would hope Welsh Government would reconsider. We would also like more money to be given to health, but we are acutely aware that it isn’t just about the amount of money being spent but how that money is spent and managed on a day-to-day basis.

To the Conservative spokesman, reflected by UKIP and their call for the protection of health budgets, let’s look at what the Conservatives have done in England. Anybody who thinks it’s possible to improve health services through cutting social care as they have done there probably needs to spend a little bit more time thinking about the real problems that we do face in real terms in the NHS in Wales. I will give way.

Do you accept that this constant mantra from the Welsh Government in relation to protecting social care has absolutely nothing to do with them here in Wales, because, of course, decisions on social care budgets are entirely a matter for local authorities and not for the Welsh Government?

With respect, the uncoupling, seemingly, of the interrelationship between social care and health in England has led to disastrous consequences. We cannot ignore the fact that if you stop investing in social care, the health service is what will suffer at the end of the day. That’s why we need to work towards integration. It is not through undermining one part of that which we wish to integrate that you build a service that is holistic and serves the people of Wales well.

The budget agreement, however, that we have worked on with this Government does, I think, represent a step towards achieving Plaid Cymru’s ambition of a healthier Wales, and whether it’s in additional money for medical education, diagnostic equipment, mental health spending, eating disorders, gender identity services in Wales, or end-of-life care, I think what we have here are improvements that will bring about tangible improvements and secure some services in Wales for the very first time. I’ll look at some of the expenditure areas in a little bit more detail.

Mae addysg feddygol yn rhywbeth rydw i’n gobeithio bod yna gonsensws yn tyfu arno fo yn fan hyn. Mae’n rhaid inni sicrhau bod ein hysgolion meddygol, ac addysg feddygol yn ehangach, yn darparu ar gyfer y gwasanaeth iechyd yng Nghymru. Mae hynny’n mynd i olygu’r angen am fuddsoddi ac am ehangu darpariaeth. Mae’r £7 miliwn a gafodd ei sicrhau ar gyfer y flwyddyn nesaf, 2017-18, rwy’n gobeithio, yn mynd i fod yn gam tuag at hynny, nid yn unig yn cryfhau ein hysgolion meddygol presennol ni, ond hefyd, rydw i’n gobeithio, yn mynd i’n galluogi ni i symud ymlaen tuag at greu haen newydd o addysg feddygol gymunedol a fydd yn mynd ag addysg feddygol i graidd yr ardaloedd hynny o Gymru sydd fwyaf angen gweld cynnydd o ran recriwtio a hyfforddi.

Mae £15 miliwn o arian cyfalaf ar gyfer cyfarpar diagnostig, ac rydym yn gwybod—rydw i wedi siarad am y peth lawer tro—fod Plaid Cymru wedi ymrwymo i wella amseroedd diagnosis yng Nghymru, gan fod diagnosis cynnar o salwch yn cynnwys yn enwedig, o bosib, canser, yn gwella rhagolygon am oroesi’n sylweddol. Mae Cymru wedi syrthio y tu ôl i berfformiad cenhedloedd eraill yn y Deyrnas Unedig, ac rydw i’n gobeithio bydd y buddsoddiad yma yn gam positif i’r cyfeiriad iawn.

Ar iechyd meddwl: £20 miliwn ar gyfer y flwyddyn ariannol nesaf. Mae gwasanaethau iechyd meddwl wedi cael eu tan-gyllido ers yn llawer rhy hir, er bod y gwasanaethau wedi gweld galw’n cynyddu ledled Cymru. I sefydlu clinigau anhwylderau bwyta a hunaniaeth rhywedd i Gymru: £1 miliwn ar gyfer y flwyddyn nesaf. Mae Plaid Cymru eisiau ein gweld ni, yma, yn arwain y ffordd mewn sawl maes ac mae anhwylderau bwyta yn un o’r rheini rydym eisiau arwain y byd arnynt, o ran cefnogi a thrin y sawl sy’n dioddef o anhwylderau bwyta, ac y mae hwn, eto, yn gam positif.

Yn olaf, cyllid ychwanegol ar gyfer gofal diwedd oes: £1 miliwn yn y fan honno. Nid yw’n ddigon, wrth gwrs, ond mae o yn ddechrau. Rydw i’n falch iawn bod hynny wedi cael ei gynnwys yn y cytundeb. Mi wnaf gloi, gan fod y cloc wedi fy nghuro i. Mae Plaid Cymru wedi dewis yn y fan hon i wthio am y pethau rydym ni’n gwybod sy’n iawn. Mi fyddai wedi bod yn haws mewn llawer ffordd i wthio am adeilad sgleiniog newydd yn rhywle, ond mae yna feysydd yma lle rydym ni’n hyderus ein bod ni’n ennill tir, ond mewn cyd-destun cyllideb, wrth gwrs, mi fyddwn ni’n parhau i roi’r pwysau yn drwm ar y Llywodraeth yn ei gylch.

We live in the most uncertain times. My colleague, Mark Drakeford, opened his budget statement back in October with those words. And he’s right. The times could not be more uncertain for the UK and for Wales and it is the Tory party that has brought us here.

Since 2010, the Conservative Government has robbed public services in Wales of around £1.5 billion. This sustained attack in particular on the most vulnerable of our constituents is unprecedented in the post-war era. Not content with that, the Tory party, in a spectacularly botched attempt to heal divisions within their own party, took us into a referendum that has unleashed uncertainty, division and alarm into civil society. Incredulity on both sides of industry, and such instability in Europe has not been seen since the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. All reasonable people look on in disbelief as Johnson, Davis and Gove stumble around Europe, scrabbling for answers to the impossible situation that they have landed us in. It’s like watching a routine by the Marx brothers, minus the humour and minus the teamwork.

The Member for Torfaen compares Brexit to the collapse of Yugoslavia. Is she really making a comparison to that bloodshed and hundreds of thousands of deaths? When she talks about civil society, is she not aware that the majority of society voted for this?

I am well aware of what the referendum result is, but I’m also aware of the chaos that we are heading towards, especially with a hard Brexit.

With Groucho’s famous quote and our future in Europe in mind, who in all honesty would want to be part of a club that would have those three as members?

In the midst of this Tory chaos we must still make a budget. Amidst the shambles, the Welsh Government must champion good government. Amidst constant attack from Whitehall, we must show the people of Wales our determination to stand for a decent public realm to protect the most vulnerable and, despite everything this UK Government throws at us, lay the groundwork for a better Wales. This, the Welsh Government has done.

Through this budget, we have shown that our values chime with the values of the people of Wales. Just look at the contrasts. While the NHS in England struggles to soak up the consequences of starving social care, we in Wales invest in social care and commit an extra £0.25 billion to the NHS. While the English school system fragments into academies, free schools and now grammar schools, with all the waste that that entails, we keep our nerve and will continue to invest in school standards and school buildings. We must not be thrown off course in the scramble for a quick headline. Raising standards in schools takes time. The OECD agrees that we have the right strategies in place. I hope that we can still, even at this stage, see a re-commitment from the Welsh Government to Schools Challenge Cymru as the detail of this budget unfolds.

Whilst local government in England is throttled year after year, in Wales we recognise the pressure they are under, value the job that they have done in hugely difficult times, and do our best to protect local services. We do, indeed, live in uncertain times, perhaps even in dangerous times, Mark Reckless. If this bunch of comedians in Whitehall lands us with a hard Brexit, then dangerous times they will be. Industry will stay or move abroad based on hard figures, not rhetoric from the Marx brothers. Regeneration will crumble as structural funds evaporate, and Welsh farming will face an existential threat.

At the dawn of dangerous times in his own country, W.B. Yeats wrote,

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world /… The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’

Now, in the present, we see and hear that passionate intensity from the worst—the rampant xenophobia, the online hatred—but at least here, in Wales, the best do not lack all conviction, and this budget proves it. Whilst the Whitehall farce continues, the Welsh Government budgets for investment and to look after our people. In uncertain times it’s what the best should do.

Suzy Davies.

Diolch, Lywydd. [Interruption.] No jokes from me today, I’m afraid. I do appreciate that a draft budget isn’t the place for detailed spending plans. The sort of high-level, top-line figures are more of an opportunity, really, for the Welsh Government to throw a few coloured lights around those areas of generosity that it would like us to notice. As my party’s spokesperson on culture and Welsh language, I’m happy to welcome the additional £5 million into these very modest portfolio areas, but I also look forward to following up some of the evidence given to the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee. Because there is a difficulty, isn’t there, of examining a draft budget in isolation from the outcomes that the anticipated spending or saving is intended to achieve? It’s exactly what Adam Price said, and actually what Mark Reckless alluded to as well. What impact will this year’s spending or saving have on medium and longer term plans for improving the lives of people in Wales? I’m very happy to see that extra money for culture and heritage, but I’m also keen to see whether the loss of 25 per cent of Cadw’s capital budget will be made up by capitalised income earned at Cadw sites. I’ll also be keen to see what that money actually gets us, because I am pretty sure that Neath Abbey, in my region, could easily eat up every penny of that capital budget, even if it’s topped up, which doesn’t really leave very much for the rest of the Cadw estate, looking forward.

An additional £25 million for social services sounds like a decent sum of money to invest, but what will that £25 million actually get? And, Lynne Neagle, I’m sure you’ll be interested to know this as well, as you actually mentioned it in your contribution. The Minister, on 9 November, confirmed that the extra £25 million for social services was, quote,

‘in respect and in understanding of the severe pressures that the social services sector are under at the moment. Pressures include, for example, the national living wage’.

And I agree entirely with her that, thanks to the UK Government, it is great, to further quote the Minister, that low-paid workers will be getting that increase in pay. However, earlier this year, the Association of Directors of Social Services claimed that, without increased funding combined with innovative solutions, the only way councils in Wales will be able to cope with the increased costs from the national living wage is by commissioning fewer services.

Now, I would be the first to recommend that all public services look for innovative solutions, but what I’m not sure about is how much of that extra £25 million will be spent on the difference between the old minimum wage and next year’s living wage. Will that £25 million see off the threat of a reduction in commissioned services? And we also need to know, if there is any money left over after the wages bill, whether the Government expects any of that £25 million to supplement the £4.5 million being allocated towards—and ‘towards’ is the word—meeting the costs to local authorities of the new savings threshold for those in care homes. The words suggest that £4.5 million won’t meet that total cost. In short, we need to know how much of that £25 million is left over to address the other severe pressures.

The reason we need to know that is that this £25 million is not ring-fenced; it is entirely vulnerable to competing demands for money within every single council in Wales, yet the Minister gave evidence to the Finance Committee that she did not want to direct councils’ spending other than on ensuring that we have strong, sustainable social services for the future. Well, we all want to see that, but if you have no idea what £25 million could and should pay for above paying better wages, where has the figure of £25 million come from? Why isn’t it being used to ease the pressure on children’s social services and work on partnership and integration—a core principle of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 as well, as Mark Isherwood mentioned, and indeed the parliamentary review into health and social care—instead of being moved into some other part of the main expenditure group?

Why aren’t you easing pressure on social services by at least retaining your level of support for the Family Fund? Don’t you think that the impact that this will have on the carers of severely disabled and seriously ill children—primarily women, of course, talking of gender impacts—let alone the children themselves, is likely to increase their assessed needs? More work for social services. And what are your grounds for limiting payments from the third sector grant scheme? Have you done an impact assessment on what is likely to happen to social services, which will be required to take on more work directly as a result of such a decision? The transfers within the MEG for communities and children—how are we supposed to follow the money there to ensure that social services won’t be having to meet even greater pressures? If we are to be—and this is all of us—positive contributors and critical friends on the Government’s health and social care integration agenda, then don’t dazzle us with the coloured lights, just make it easier to see what’s not actually being illuminated.

Well, as a Member who is still comparatively new to this place, I hope I’ll be forgiven if I haven’t fully understood the conventions of the budget debate, although I think I’ve grasped the pattern over recent years. I haven’t myself been here to witness at first hand the cut, cut, cut to the Welsh Government’s budget over each successive year; I haven’t seen at first hand the tightening of the grip by the UK Government on the budgetary windpipe of this Assembly. And we arrive at a situation where, by the end of this decade, we’ll have not more, but £1.5 billion less for vital public services. This will lead to an 8 per cent reduction in real terms in the Welsh budget since 2010. Do we have 8 per cent fewer patients in the NHS, 8 per cent fewer students in the classroom, 8 per cent fewer young people wanting an apprenticeship, 8 per cent fewer people in need of social housing or social care? No, we don’t. Against a declining budget, we’re not even standing still. The very opposite is true. Demand is going up. Social need is going up. Social need is going up precisely because of the austerity agenda at the root of this. The reality is that the UK Government is cutting the budget, and the Welsh Government is carrying the cost.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has described Wales as facing 11 years—an extraordinary 11 years—or more of cuts in public service spending. Extraordinary. Well, there are people in this Chamber who have other words for that. We talk, don’t we, of hard choices and difficult decisions? And the Government does that here in Wales. And whilst I understand that, we all know that the real difficult decisions are being taken day by day by those people actually bearing the brunt of this austerity agenda—making the difficult choice between eating or heating, making thousands of difficult choices that people should not have to make in a country like ours.

And now we face a further £59 billion taken out of the economy—a sum equivalent to four times what the Welsh Government spends each year. If you’re wondering about the cost of Brexit, now you have a number. And, believe me, much of that cost is going to be borne by communities here in Wales. So, we’re told by the Conservatives that we must tighten our belts, told that we need to do more with less. So, let’s turn to the Conservative amendment.

‘Delete all, and replace with’, oh, there’s nothing there. No alternative, no ideas, nothing; just a hole where a competing vision should be. So, I commend the Welsh Government on this budget. More money for health and care, more money for education, the best local government settlement in years, money for childcare, money for apprenticeships. Making good on our commitments. Would I have liked to have seen more for some areas and less for others? Of course I would. I dare say all of us can say that. We all have our own set of priorities. But, is it a budget that, despite the continuing efforts of the Conservatives, reflects our Welsh Labour commitment to social justice, and to raise and meet the aspirations of our communities? Yes, it is.

It’s important to discuss two areas where Plaid Cymru has had an influence on this budget: first of all the Welsh language, and additional funding for Welsh for adults, and funding to establish a national language agency. We secured an additional £5 million for 2017-18. Plaid Cymru believes that the Welsh language belongs to everyone in Wales, and we are committed therefore to ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to learn the language if they wish to do so. The additional funding for Welsh for adults will assist in enabling this programme to provide more language training for teachers and workers in the public sector, and will provide more support for parents who want to use the Welsh language more at home. Funding was also allocated for the establishment of a national language agency, which will be an arm’s length body, and will offer an opportunity to provide a new and firm foundation for Welsh Government policy of regenerating the Welsh language and creating a truly bilingual Wales, including the aim of creating 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050.

Our vision is an agency that will lead policy, will be responsible for a strategic overview in the area, and will have a high status among Welsh Government departments and other agencies, such as NRW and the arts council, and I very much look forward to working with the Minister to achieve that aim. In the meantime, I will continue to keep a close eye on the Welsh in education strategic plans provided by local authorities. These have to be robust, effective and ambitious, with milestones and clearly set targets. Therefore, we will be holding you to your word in that regard.

I just want to say a few words on the funding allocated within the budget to a pilot scheme to reduce town-centre parking charges. Now, it’s a very small amount of money, a total of £3 million for a pilot scheme in 2017-18, but it is a scheme that has engendered a great deal of debate in this Chamber and outwith it. Of course, we must bear in mind the purpose of this pot of funding. Its purpose is to assist small businesses on our high streets.

Plaid Cymru is committed to assisting small businesses the length and breadth of Wales who have faced challenging times over the past few years. This funding for the pilot scheme will assist in attracting more people to our town centres. The final details and the practicalities of the pilot scheme are yet to be decided, but I have been clear that we do need a specific, allocated pot of funding so that councils can bid for funding to support reducing town centre car parking charges. In my view, distributing it through the RSG isn’t going to work, and it’s not acceptable. We need an allocated pot of funding for this. The proposals will then give a crucial boost to small businesses in Wales and provide a level playing field for our town centres that have been in competition with larger developments on the outskirts of our towns. How exactly this scheme works is an issue for discussion among councillors too, and it is being discussed. The details should be decided as soon as possible, and Plaid Cymru is happy to contribute to that debate.

In moving on to the next period, having three-year budgeting will certainly be beneficial for our county councils so that they can make plans for the future. I’m certain that they would welcome that development. In terms of the budget and the lack of transparency within it, I agree entirely that we must move to a situation where we have an entirely transparent budget where we can scrutinise line by line. That’s what someone from a local authority background is used to, and to be honest, I can’t believe that such a situation can exist in this place—that we can’t actually see the details that we need in order to provide a better budget ultimately, and a budget that will deliver real improvements for the people of Wales. Thank you.

Before discussing the finer details of this budget or, in fact, any budget, it is important to look at the context. The context for this budget are the years—endless years, it seems—of cuts and cuts, and cuts again, from the Westminster Government to Wales, and it’s been driven by twin fetishisms of deficit abolition—not reduction, but abolition; it’s been the defining policy of the last Conservative Government, and it has spectacularly failed—and an ideology of smaller and smaller Government and shrunken public services. This has resulted in a strangulated UK economy from 2010 onwards. It didn’t have to be like that.

As well as choking off economic growth, this policy has attacked public services bit by bit, day by day, month after month, and it’s been a sustained onslaught. It is a remarkable testament to our communities, and to our policy defence in Wales, that we are still standing, but let’s not pretend there have not been casualties. This has been traumatic; it’s been devastating and unnecessary.

The food bank I was collecting for on the weekend is not some aberration. It’s not disconnected from this. It’s a direct result of asking those with the narrowest shoulders to bear the greatest burdens of austerity, and this is the context against which successive Ministers in Wales have had to set difficult budgets and to share some of those difficulties with local authorities and other public sector agencies, and with the third sector too. To pass over this hard, enduring reality is to ignore the fact that many of the difficulties that we now have are self-imposed or, more accurately, imposed on us by a dogma of disinvestment from the UK Government. That was, and remains, a UK policy choice.

So, whenever we discuss health, education, transport, any public services or the voluntary sector, this is the context in which it is discussed. A choice was made in 2010, in No. 10, to squeeze the country. This weight was not borne by the broadest shoulders; it was borne by ordinary people who have been, quite frankly, extraordinary in their resilience to this deep and lasting unfairness. But many have been hurt and many are still hurting very badly indeed. But despite this, the successive Ministers in Wales have tried their best—their damnedest—to protect, to the best of their ability, the economy and the public services that we value in Wales, to maintain the integrity of local authorities and the voluntary sector organisations and, at the same time, to bring forward innovative devolution bonuses from the policy differences we can make in Wales—the choices we can make in Wales. This budget, carefully thought through by a very thoughtful Minister, who pays careful attention to the detail and the nuances, is also doing the very best for the people we represent by making difficult, still, but intelligent choices on what we should prioritise when faced with continued austerity. Now, the uncertainty of Brexit is added to it, and the potential future loss of European funding.

We have had 8 per cent cuts in real terms since 2010. The lack of clarity on revenue streams means that the Cabinet Secretary can only set a one-year revenue budget, probably anticipating worse to come from Westminster, while hoping for better. The extra capital spend announced by the Chancellor in the autumn statement is welcome—of course it is—but ultimately, it only goes a little way to make up for the strangulation we’ve had over recent years. Taking your foot off the victim’s throat for a moment doesn’t instantly make the victim recover and certainly doesn’t make the victim grateful. But the Cabinet Secretary and his colleagues have, once again, provided the very best of a defence against continued austerity.

So, let’s look at some of the detail in the measures in front of us in this draft budget. There is £240 million extra investment to meet the growing costs and demands in the Welsh health service. There is £16 million that the Welsh Government will provide in 2017-18 for the new treatment fund and £1 million funding for end-of-life care services. These are significant policy choices and budget choices. On the delivery of the manifesto commitment of 30 hours of free childcare a week for working parents of three and four-year-olds for 48 weeks of the year, £10 million is allocated within this budget for 2017-18 to push that forward.

If you look at the local government settlement, it’s still going to be tough, but for the first time in many years, there will be an increase of £3.8 million in its funding for 2017-18, compared with 2016-17. This is the first increase in the settlement for local government since 2013-14. It all goes back to that agenda of austerity and what we can do to withstand it.

If we look at affordable housing, there’s a crying need for—I can see, Presiding Officer, that I’ve just gone over time—the investment in social housing.

Let me just say, in closing, before dealing with the infrastructure investment that we can still do, these are just some of the defining priorities of this Welsh Labour Government, after support, I have to say, in dialogue with others who share a progressive agenda for Wales. I commend the Cabinet Secretary for his deft footwork. It would be worthy of ‘Strictly’.

With no interest in ‘Strictly’, but with a huge amount of interest in this debate on the draft budget, may I thank all those who’ve contributed, almost, especially from this side of the Chamber? But I will focus my attention on this agreement between Labour and Plaid Cymru that has delivered what we have to study before us today.

I would agree with those comments that we do need greater transparency in this budgetary process so that we can get to grips with where exactly—. If we decide to promise that we are going to spend on something, we must ensure that we can find out to all of our satisfaction—all of us, from every party—to prove to ourselves, before we can vote, that the promises have been fulfilled and that we see the development in this budgetary process of much greater transparency, to reflect the words that we’ve heard from Sian Gwenllian and Adam Price this afternoon.

Of course, this agreement between Plaid Cymru and Labour is just part of the budget. We are naturally supportive of our work and the hard work done by Adam Price and the team in that regard, and that’s enough to ensure that we, as a party, will be abstaining when it comes to a vote on this draft budget.

I was going to focus briefly on my portfolio, namely heritage and culture. Of course, this agreement between Plaid Cymru and Labour has ensured around £3 million in additional to the arts. This means an increase in the budget for the Arts Council of Wales, an increase in the budget for the National Museum Wales, the National Library of Wales and the Welsh Books Council—an increase in their budgets on top of what they would have been allocated already.

Of course, this agreement of £3 million also means funding for feasibility studies for a football museum in Wrexham and of course a feasibility study for a national contemporary art gallery. That leaves some funding for us to support the Welsh music industry and the performing arts.

There is a great deal for us to welcome as a party in this agreement between Plaid Cymru and the Labour Party. Of course, as I’ve already said, this is only part of this entire budget—it’s one part of the wider budget. I’m not going to repeat some of the statements that have already been made, but I would agree with many of the words that have been said this afternoon not just about the transparency of the process but of course with the priorities set for us as a nation when we face a funding crisis such as this one.

But, on these benches, we are very pleased with what we’ve managed to agree following very hard work done by Adam and the Cabinet Secretary. We’re very pleased that we’ve been able to amend what was before us. There would have been less work without us. We are very pleased with that work and that’s enough to lead us to abstain when it comes to the vote. Thank you.

I thoroughly enjoyed the high-level debate that took place between Nick Ramsay and Adam Price at the beginning. I would say that, as an undergraduate, I was taught by Patrick Minford and I remember the time he drew on the board a number of mathematical equations and he said, ‘This, my friends, is a Rolls-Royce theory of the money supply and it’s all you really need to know about macroeconomics’. Well, I didn’t understand it then and I don’t agree with it now.

I’ve seen as a councillor the direct effects that cuts have. What’s happened in my experience is, you get a cross-party seminar, you sit down, you look at the budget and you’ve got to decide where those cuts are going to fall. It’s one of the hardest things you can do. After 10 years as a councillor—it’s my last year this year—I would say it’s not why we went into politics. The recent UK autumn statement showed that there’s not much coming Wales’s way that way either.

So, my ambition for a Welsh budget is one that brings prosperity and jobs and growth to Wales and for my constituents in Caerphilly, but that means difficult choices. It means what we learnt as opportunity costs, which was more of a microeconomic concept, and something that we have to deal with. It gives a great many opportunities for party political division, and I suspect we’ll see more of that, but some of those choices have to be unpalatable. We need to decide what is in the box of choices that we’re going to make.

So, I’m pleased to see that the draft budget sets out plans for £6.9 billion of capital funding from the Welsh Government’s capital settlement, making full use of capital borrowing powers. Of great importance to my constituents is the shared £1.2 billion city deal for the Cardiff capital region that was agreed in principle between the UK Government, the Welsh Government and the 10 local authorities—and they’re working so well together to try and bring that to fruition. But the key issue in the city deal will be the benefit to the northern Valleys, areas that have huge potential. A city deal that doesn’t bring prosperity beyond the Caerphilly basin is no deal at all. This is why the £734 million of the deal allocated to the south Wales metro is of such significance and it should be noted that the proportion allocated from European funding should go ahead and not be threatened despite Brexit. Brexit does offer us a big threat.

We need, as a result of our budget, a reliable system of cross-valley public transport, making connections between communities with limited contact, enabling people to access work in a range of locations other than Cardiff. I’m therefore pleased that the Welsh Government has allocated the majority of the capital funding available to it in setting out a four-year capital plan to provide confidence and assurance to the construction sector, businesses and investors, because when we’ve cut in the past in local government, we’ve seen the private sector suffer. This budget commits £369 million towards the metro, which I assume will at least partly cover the cost of electrifying the Valleys lines. I’d like the Cabinet Secretary therefore to clarify if he knows whether the UK Government is still committed to its £125 million funding pledge for Valleys lines electrification to ensure that this goes ahead. When his colleague, the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure, came before the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee last month, he said the metro was built on flexible foundations and would be an ongoing piece of work similar to what happened in Manchester. Therefore, I would also ask whether this will provide flexibility in the budget allocation so we can meet new requirements as an when they come up. I’d like, for example, to see a metro stop at the proposed new specialist critical care centre in Cwmbran, and Nick Ramsay has already raised his preference for stops elsewhere. I’d like to see the budget being flexible enough to contain that.

It’s good to see the Welsh Government is keeping to its part of the Cardiff city deal and is determined to see this ambitious project through uncertain economic times. I’d say myself that, in my last year in local government as a councillor, I will find it slightly easier this time than we have in the past. It’s vital now that we work together to see this through so that we can no longer rely on European Union money in the longer term.

I think what we’ve done here is make the best of a bad job, really. We all know of the situation from Westminster with the cuts coming from London, but I think people here have to realise that you over there are elected to be the Government, and you need to take responsibility. What I find ironic, really, is that people in the lead administration don’t even want the authority to change Wales that we do on this side of the Chamber. The treatment fund is welcome. Safer ways to school—welcome. More funding for mental health—very welcome. Feasibility study for the football museum is welcome, as is the feasibility study for Lôn Rhiannon, the cycle and broadband and walking way proposed to connect Wales—a good idea.

I think the biggest problem, though, with this budget is the one-party state that has been created over the last 17 years, because we’ve got a new quangocracy, new quangos, millions of pounds spent on commissioners, for example. I’ll maybe just focus on one. We have the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, costing £1.5 million. I met with the commissioner two weeks ago. She’s not even looked at local development plans in any detail, and there seemed to be a lack of interest in doing anything about protected species, which will be destroyed by that local development plan. If we go back to the budget and look at LDPs themselves, we’re talking tens of millions of pounds wasted—wasted—on a system that is not fit for purpose. So, when you come here and you talk about the difficult choices and there’s not enough money, what I’m doing here now is flagging up to you how you’ve wasted money. Lisvane: £39 million; Rhoose: £7 million; Pontypridd deal on the shops: £1 million; Kancoat: £3.4 million. This is the money that this Labour Government throws around like confetti. Now, we all know the situation is—

Will you take an intervention?

I will, yes.

It’s a simple question. I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again. You can save £13,000 straight away by giving back your councillor allowance for the last year. I’ve done it; why don’t you do it? It would be a great example.

Well, you could easily have asked the same of your colleague who is the finance Minister, when he did three jobs at the same time—Minister, AM and also a further education lecturer. My position on my allowance is quite clear: next year, it’s going to my community. But, to return to the throwing away of millions of pounds—millions of pounds—I’ve just flagged up to you where you have wasted tens of millions of pounds on the grant procedures, your land deals and local development plans. Let’s look at the micro. I’ll give you one example of how you guys do business in local government. One decision made across the way was to close my local youth centre through political choices. The council has done two things over there: rather than protect services, as we want to do here, they spent £30,000 on newspapers and—[Interruption.] I’ve given way once and I’m not giving way again. They are spending £30,000 on newspapers. [Interruption.]

It’s up to the Member whether he gives way or not and he is not, and he is finishing his contribution.

Thanks. I’ve given way once.

[Continues.]—£30,000 on newspapers and they spent £60,000 on a conference called Core Cities. Those political decisions taken by your colleagues, with silence from you, have closed my youth centre. So, I’ve given you £90,000, which we would’ve spent differently. It’s the same principle with what is happening here. You have decided to spend tens of millions of pounds on a planning system that is not fit for purpose. In fact, it will destroy our environment. So, my message to—. Are you listening? I think some of you are listening as well as heckling. Certainly, my message to the public is that what we need in Wales is a Government that will take responsibility and a Government that seeks to change Wales and that will be found on this side of the Chamber. Diolch yn fawr.

I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government to reply to the debate.

Diolch yn fawr, Lywydd. It’s been a wide-ranging debate and, until the last five minutes, a debate that was well worth listening to. I hope you’ll forgive me, Llywydd, that I’m not going to be able to reply to all Members by name, but what I’m going to try to do is to respond to what I think have been the essential themes of the debate.

Let me begin with what seems to me to be, at least for the most part, the fundamental dividing line that runs down this Chamber. On the one hand, you have Mark Reckless and Mark Isherwood who want to explain to us why austerity is a necessity. Mark Reckless set out, in the way with which I’m sure he is very familiar, the neoliberal case for that form of economics. On the other side of the Chamber, you have Mike Hedges, Huw Irranca-Davies and Adam Price who set out—and surely this is a fundamental point of politics—that even if you believe in the neoliberal case and you can make the case for it, there is always a choice in politics. The argument that we are obliged to accept the dogmas of austerity because there is nothing else available to us is one that is absolutely right for us to reject, because those of us who do not accept those dogmas believe simply, as Adam said, that you cannot cut your way to recovery. There simply is no economic pathway to a future if you believe—

Would the Cabinet Secretary give way?

Yes, of course.

I just wonder, we’ve heard a lot about the context we’re in for these particular budgets now, but let this wicked Tory observe that what happened between 2010 and 2015 with the coalition Government was not a million miles away from the Darling plan.

Well, I can assure the Member that what we are recovering from today is something very different from what would’ve been in place in other circumstances. The only recipe that George Osborne had was to be a practitioner of medieval medicine. As the patient weakened in front of him, his only response was to go on bleeding it further and further and further. And that’s why we’re in the position we are in today. That’s why, on this side of the Chamber, we say, again, as we did all along, austerity is a political choice. There is an alternative and had that alternative been followed, then, the impacts on individual people’s lives, in the way that Hefin David set out, would not be as they are.

The second big theme in the debate has been that of uncertainty. The uncertainty created by Brexit, as Lynne Neagle set out; the uncertainty created by not yet having a fiscal framework in place, as Nick Ramsay reminded us; and the uncertainty created by the real-terms reductions in our budgets. These are not fictions; these are not things that you can simply evaporate by demanding more money for this and more money for that. Our budgets will be 9 per cent lower in revenue terms, and 21 per cent lower in capital terms at the end of this Assembly term. That is a real impact on what we can do and creates that extraordinary decade of austerity.

On a more positive note, Llywydd, there have been a lot of contributions this afternoon that have talked about participation. I particularly wanted to refer to the work that the Finance Committee did during its scrutiny of the budget, in going out and gathering views from our fellow citizens about what they think our priorities should be. I’m very glad that our agreement with Plaid Cymru has a commitment to a pilot participatory exercise on the Welsh Government’s budget next year, and I look forward to working with the Finance Committee to learn from their experience.

There has been a range of questions this afternoon, understandably, I know, about the effect of the autumn statement on capital investment and where we may be able to act. As I explained in my opening remarks, I’m not in a position yet to make those announcements, but I will as soon as possible. Because the Chair of the Finance Committee and others referred specifically to flooding issues, I’ll simply go as far as to say again what I said in front of the committee, which is that my first priority in looking at any additional capital that came our way would be to respond to those places in the budget where cuts have had to be made.

We’ve heard some very interesting things this afternoon, I believe, Llywydd, about the budget process—lots of ideas about what we can do to reform that process, as we know that it must be reformed. I admitted in my opening remarks that this has not been an ideal set of conditions for us to create our budget in. I would just remind Members that the Scottish Parliament is yet to see a draft budget at all from the Scottish Government; they’re not going to lay their draft, even, until 15 December.

A gaf i droi, jest am funud, at y cytundeb rhwng y Llywodraeth a Phlaid Cymru? Fe wnaeth Mark Reckless ofyn a oes pethau penodol yn y cytundeb rhyngom ni a Phlaid Cymru ac, wrth gwrs, mae rhestr hir o bethau penodol, fel rydym ni wedi clywed y prynhawn yma. Roedd Rhun ap Iorwerth wedi cyfeirio at bethau yn y cytundeb ym maes iechyd: £1 miliwn ychwanegol i helpu pobl ar ddiwedd eu hoes, ac £20 miliwn ym maes iechyd meddwl. Rydym ni’n mynd i roi’r arian yna y tu mewn i’r ‘ring fence’ i helpu pobl sy’n dioddef o broblemau iechyd meddwl. Fe wnaeth Sian Gwenllian gyfeirio at y pethau ar y rhestr o ran yr iaith Gymraeg ac ar y peilot rydym ni’n mynd i’w redeg ar barcio ar y stryd fawr. Ac roedd Dai Lloyd wedi cyfeirio at y celfyddydau, ac nid jest y pethau rydym ni’n gallu eu gwneud yn y flwyddyn yma, ond y pethau sydd yn y cytundeb rydym yn mynd i siarad â’n gilydd amdanyn nhw—y pethau y gallwn ni eu gwneud yn y dyfodol. Wrth gwrs, rydw i’n cydnabod, ar ôl gwneud y gwaith, y bydd Plaid Cymru am ymatal ar ddiwedd y prynhawn yma.

The last thing, Llywydd, for me to refer to—and it’s the only one I’m going to be able to in the time available, in terms of specific policy issues—and I do so because, again, it just, to my mind, exposes a fault line in the Assembly: there are those of us who believe that health and social care go hand in hand, that you cannot allow one to compete with the other for resources, that, from the point of view of the user and the patient, it is a single system on which they need to be able to rely, and there are others who continually make the assumption that you’ve got to make choices between those two aspects of somebody’s life. In the budget that we present, we have the £60 million intermediate care fund preserved, which sits right at the cusp of those two services, driving newly integrated forms of planning and providing between them. It is no use at all, as we’ve always said, to a person stuck in a hospital bed, to believe that money is being artificially provided to the health service when they cannot find any way of being looked after at home or in their community.

Thus it is, Llywydd, that you have a budget in front of you—a budget of stability, but a budget of ambition as well, that will help to create a Wales that is more prosperous and secure, healthy and active, ambitious and learning, united and connected. It’s a budget that I hope the Assembly will endorse this afternoon.

The proposal is to agree amendment 1. Does any Member object? [Objection.] I will therefore defer all voting on this item until voting time.

Voting deferred until voting time.