I thank Neil Hamilton for the initial broad welcome he gave to the framework. I'll just try and respond to, I think, three different points that he made. The disaggregation work of HMRC in the table to which he referred—I think I’d draw a couple of different conclusions from it than he does. The reason that it shows declining income tax receipts from Wales is essentially because of rising thresholds at the bottom end of income tax distribution over that period. And because Wales has a higher proportion of its population that pays tax on the bottom band of income tax, if those thresholds rise faster than inflation, as they generally have over that period, there is an inevitability that income tax receipts in Wales decline relative to other parts of the United Kingdom with a different income tax distribution. Now, this was a very important consideration in the agreement of the fiscal framework. It's why we have an agreement that the Welsh economy for income tax purposes is compared separately at each of the three bands, and why the block grant adjustment will be taken into account separately against those three very different ways in which income tax is raised.

So, I think it's an important point that he raises, and he’s right to point to HMRC's work, but I don't think its conclusions are quite as bleak for Wales as he suggested, and I think that our future ability to raise revenue in Wales and the fiscal framework will help to protect us against decisions that are made elsewhere over which we have no direct control but which have an impact on the extent to which income tax receipts are collected here in Wales.

On the business of corporation tax, of course he is quite right to say that this is a non-devolved matter. Silk suggested that it should only be devolved to Wales if it were at the same time to be devolved to both Scotland as well as Northern Ireland, and I’m sure the Member would find it interesting to explore the Northern Irish experience to date, where the practical use of the devolution of corporation tax has proved much more difficult than originally anticipated. In particular, the Treasury’s refusal to take into account second-order effects of corporation tax devolution has meant that, from a Northern Ireland perspective, they will pay all the costs of corporation tax devolution with very few of the benefits. That’s why its introduction, I think, has been delayed there.

On his final point, let me say this to him: I think he too often is in danger of falling into the ‘private good, public bad’ mantra of his youth, of his Thatcherite, palaeoliberal, was it, past. What I would say to him is this: I think we are very clear in our framework that we recognise that the way we discharge our fiscal responsibilities will have a direct impact on the future of the Welsh economy, and that we want to exercise these responsibilities in a way that helps to grow the Welsh economy and to create new sources of wealth and income for the people of Wales in the future. There’s no ambiguity in the Welsh Government’s position in that, and we will always have the interests of our economy at the forefront of our mind when we come to make the decisions that are now being devolved to us here in Wales.