Well, Mike Hedges’s opening remarks about perceived fairness of the tax system is very important to us in this framework. We put a lot of emphasis on conducting taxation in Wales in a way that Welsh citizens will regard as fair. Part of the reason that things happened in the way they did last week, I think, was a sense, on behalf of lots of people in Wales and beyond, that the way that the economy has been conducted in recent years has not been one in which the burden has been placed on the shoulders of those most able to bear it. Mike makes a very important point about powers and their usefulness and their usability, and we will see, over the next couple of years, the extent to which the powers that we currently have can be put to work in a way that differentiates them from use elsewhere as we try and match them with Welsh needs and circumstances.

In relation to the three specific questions, I think the Silk commission said that VAT was not a tax—that it had considered the devolution because of European Union harmonisation rules. I have agreed with Adam Price recently, when he’s asked questions on this, that this is at least something that we now ought to be prepared to look at, to see whether there is anything there that can be more additionally useful without EU membership rules.

The question of how we scrutinise the budget and put it together in a way that revenue raised and spending decisions made are aligned with one another: well, I hope that you will see that the proposals that will come forward next week go some way to doing that already, and the further work that the Finance Committee will do on further alignment will be a help in that. I think we’d have to recognise that there is a genuine difficulty in the UK Government’s decision that an autumn budget means the end of November. Because for both ourselves and for Scotland and Northern Ireland that inevitably means that we will have laid our draft budget, and, in the middle of the process of its being scrutinised, potentially significant changes could be made at the UK level that will mean that some of the assumptions we made at the start on revenue and on spend will be changed before the final budget can be laid. At the moment, that is a difficulty without a readily to hand solution.

As far as the council tax is concerned, as I said in my answer to Nick Ramsay, we do intend to bring forward proposals for making council tax fairer, and the issue of bands and the proportion the council tax represents as a percentage of property values will be part of that consideration.