I speak in support of the second supplementary budget, but there are three points that I want to raise. First, on the health budget, according to the evidence received by the Finance Committee—and I’ll just quote from the report—

‘The Supplementary Budget includes £180 million fiscal, or cash, revenue, £4 million non-cash revenue and £3 million capital to the Health, Well-being and Sport portfolio. Of the additional fiscal revenue allocations made to departments, 71.5% go to this portfolio.’

It’s 71.5 per cent when the budget is pushing 50 per cent, so if it only had it pro rata it would have been running at around about 50 per cent, rather than 71.5 per cent.

‘This includes £75.9m to help address forecast overspends by health boards (£68.4m announced in November and a further £7.5m allocated in January).’

That came as a surprise. My experience of health boards and the old hospital boards was that that they overspent in the first quarter—massively—overspent slightly in the second quarter, and then started bringing things back in the third and fourth quarter. What we’ve actually seen here is continuation of an overspend in the third quarter, which I find surprising, disappointing and problematic.

‘£50m to address winter pressures and to sustain and improve performance during winter period; £27m to address the estimated shortfall of income from the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme; £16m to support the launch of the new Treatment Fund; £1m for the air ambulance service.’

‘Funding for winter pressures has been included in second supplementary budgets in recent years; £50 million in 2016-17; £45 million in 2015-16 and £40 million in 2014-15.’

I’m open to correction by others, but it’s not been a particularly cold winter, and I’ve seen no evidence of a major outbreak of influenza, so I don’t understand why additional money for winter pressures needs to be in the supplementary budget. Either it’s needed each year, and should be in the base budget, or it is not needed.

Can I turn to committee recommendation 1, that

‘the Welsh Government review whether there are structural factors, which are not currently considered in health board allocation, that impact on health boards’ ability to deliver services within their resource allocations. The Welsh Government should implement any changes to funding allocations’?

If two health boards need additional money each year, then either the formula allocating the finance is wrong and is leaving them underfunded—meaning they have to seek additional funding each year—or they are not managing their resources effectively, or a combination of the two. I am very, very pleased that the Cabinet Secretary for Finance said at the Finance Committee that

‘he was working with the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport to establish whether there were issues behind the overspends which were out of the hands of the health boards involved.’

But we can’t keep on increasing the percentage of the money we spend on health—until we get to 100 per cent; at that time, we have to stop. But there are an awful lot of other services as well. I’m going to be boring now, because I say this all the time: we should be spending more money on trying to stop people being ill in the first place, improving people’s health, trying to cut down on type 2 diabetes by making people lose weight and not end up in that situation, trying to get people more active so they tend not to have the problems that come with inactivity. And most importantly of all—I was going to quote David Melding for something he said several years ago, before I was a Member here—the most important thing that can be done is to stop people smoking. And if we can do more to stop people smoking, then we can deal with some of the health problems. The other thing is that—and I’ve said this many times before, but I’m going to say it again—can we ensure that doctors do not undertake interventions that either do harm or do no good?

Briefly, on two other points: my support for invest-to-save is well known, and I thank Nick Ramsay for being my lead-in on this, but an income and expenditure sheet would be very helpful. I understand some invest-to-save schemes will take longer to pay back than we expect. That’s inevitable, and if they didn’t, we wouldn’t be using the scheme effectively because we’d only be playing safe. We have a group of reasonable people on the Finance Committee, and I think that if we see that some of them take five years rather than three years, but the intention was there, then we’re not going to be criticising and attacking the Government for doing something if it’s doing good. It also means that people can identify those that aren’t worth copying into other areas. Now, I think the danger is that if we don’t identify those which take a little longer to pay back, people may decide to copy those where it’s not advantageous.

Finally, there are a number of changes in the supplementary budget in relation to the funding of student loans. The Welsh Government uses a complex modelling system to estimate the cost of providing student loans and the present value of the current loan book. My concern is—and it’s not for this supplementary budget, but it’s sort of mentioned for the Government—after 30 years from the beginning of the loan system, loans will start being written off. Is there any risk being faced by the Welsh Government when we approach the first student loan write-offs? Who will pick up the cost? After we go to the time of 30 years from when they went up to £9,000, it’s going to be even worse. So, it’s just a question really—not for now, but perhaps for the future. What’s going to happen with the student loans as they become non-paid?