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.