Firstly, can I say I very much welcome the Llandeilo bypass? We are allowed new roads in south-west Wales as well. The budget needs to be put into the context of policies being pursued at Westminster. Although almost all of the Welsh Government’s budget comes through the block grant, cuts in expenditure in England generate, via the Barnett formula, cuts in the Welsh block grant. What we’ve seen since the Conservatives came into office is a substantial real-terms cut in the Welsh budget. This is the economic equivalent of the practice of physicians until the eighteenth century of using a single treatment to treat every malady—bloodletting. The theory behind the practice changed over time, but the practice itself remained much the same, with doctors often bleeding patients until they were weak, in pain, and sometimes unconscious. That is what the Tory austerity policies are doing to Britain—bleeding the economy until it’s weak.

From Hoover in 1920s America, who turned the stock market crash into the Great Depression, to Argentina and Greece more recently, austerity has always failed. The Tories are committed to austerity, not as an economic policy, but as an ideology. They want to reduce the public sector and what they cannot cut they seek to privatise.

I want to talk about the two largest lines in Welsh Government—health and local government. Firstly, health: if current trends continue, health will exceed 50 per cent of the Welsh budget in the next two years, and my guess is probably next year. I’m now going to quote from page 16 of the Nuffield report in 2014, ‘The four health systems of the United Kingdom: How do they compare?’ Across the four countries, there had been a reduction in total in inpatient admissions per hospital doctor and dentist between 1999-2000 and 2011-12. This is an inevitable outcome of the rates of increase in numbers of hospital doctors exceeding the rates of increase in hospital admissions. Wales fell from just under 140 to approximately 90—approximately a drop of about a third. What the current figures are, I do not know, but I would be amazed if they were anywhere near the 1999-2000 figure.

Health, of course, is more than about hospitals. There’s primary care and lifestyle choices. Since health boards were created, the proportion of the health budget spent on primary care has reduced. Too often, we seem to think, ‘For health, see hospitals’. One of the biggest boosts to health has been the reduction in the number of people not smoking. Getting people to stop smoking, getting people to have a more active lifestyle, reducing obesity and increasing physical exercise will all improve health, and I’m not the only one who believes that reducing the number of sports facilities such as leisure centres will impact on the health of Wales.

Turning to local government, while this year’s local government settlement is better than expected—substantially better than expected—it’s still a real-terms cut. I believe that social care within social services is under greater pressure than health. Social care is something that people need over a long period of their life. Whilst there are people who end up in hospital or having major health problems in the last 12 months to two years of their lives, people can end up needing social care support for anything up to 40 years of their lives. That is going to bear costs that will come across through local government. As more and more people are living to be 100—I’m speaking, probably, to a room full of people who all hope to do the same—I think it is important that we realise that people are going to need more and more care as they get older. This is, really, the time bomb that is sitting there, not just in Wales, but throughout the rest of western Europe.

We’ve got a health crisis in England that the Tories have created. They’ve cut local government expenditure, they’ve cut social care, and what they’ve ended up with is hospitals being unable to discharge patients. They’ve discovered where they’ve gone wrong, they’ve changed what used to be their policy on local government, and we haven’t had a local government debate without Janet Finch-Saunders getting up and saying, ‘We should have a freeze on council tax.’ But you’ve changed it in England now; you say you can raise money to pay for social care, which is not going to be particularly advantageous in the poorest regions. It’s almost like going back to the old Poor Law, where the poorest areas, which have the most people in need, have the least capacity to raise money, while the richer areas have the greater capacity to raise money. That’s where social care is going and I, for one, am not happy with that, and I’m very glad that we’ve got a Labour Government in Wales, which is not following on from what the Conservatives have done to destroy health and local government in England.

Local government has faced disproportionate cuts by the Tories in England, and I’ve followed the Tories’ policies over the last six years of what they want to do: the total local government settlement should be cut and additional money should be given to health, council tax should be frozen, and local government should concentrate solely on statutory services, and central expenditure by local education authorities should end. What does it actually mean? Because people often talk about cutting things, but what do they actually mean by that? It’d mean closure of most libraries, closure of all parks, closure of all leisure centres, no free school transport, and an end to the school building programme. More importantly, as I said earlier, we would end up like England, with hospitals unable to discharge patients because they had no-one to look after them and nowhere to go.

It took centuries to discover bloodletting did not work. Let us hope the failure of austerity is going to be identified a lot sooner, preferably when we get a different type of Government.