We’ll now turn to spokespeople’s questions, and the first spokesperson today is Conservative spokesperson, Nick Ramsay.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Cabinet Secretary, this year’s Welsh Government budget represents a milestone in this the twentieth year of devolution. It’s the first budget that will cover a period that will include tax devolution, of land transaction tax and land disposals tax in the first instance, kicking off from April next year. I know that you’ve been heavily involved with me in the Finance Committee in devising those taxes. Can I ask you: can you update us on the rates of the new taxes?

I suppose it lies under ‘a good try’ sort of question. Llywydd, I will be announcing rates and bands for landfill disposals tax and land transaction tax in the draft budget that I will lay in front of this Assembly on Tuesday of next week, 3 October.

I think the Cabinet Secretary knows where I’m coming from on this, because I’ve checked the Welsh Government website page, which you may or may not be aware of, in regard to LTT, which says that the rates and bands will be announced, or were due to be announced, by the end of this month, by October 2017. So, there is not much time left for that announcement. If the information isn’t going to be published by that deadline, then can we be absolutely sure that it will be announced next week in the draft budget, and can we be sure that there will be full detail of the rates and bands as well, and not leaving us waiting for further information further down the line?

Chair, the Member will be aware, I know, that in correspondence with the chair of the Finance Committee it was agreed that announcements on rates and bands would happen on 3 October as part of a whole-budget package that I will be announcing on the floor of this Assembly next week. I’m very happy to give the Member that assurance that the rates and bands that the Welsh Government proposes will be set out in full on that day.

As you know, Cabinet Secretary, some of us on the Finance Committee, and indeed other Members of the Chamber in general, did feel that there was a very strong argument at the time for having the tax rates and bands on the face of the Bill, but your commitment at Stage 2 to publish the rates well in advance of April went a long way to allaying these concerns—a commitment that you repeated on 28 March in this Chamber, which, according to the Record, says that you said they would be published by 1 October, and I think that is the commitment that was given to the Finance Committee. [Interruption.] Okay. I’m not going to be pedantic about it at this point, Cabinet Secretary. You have committed to publish those rates and bands next week. I’ve already asked you if you will ensure that we do get the full information. Will you agree with me that the Welsh taxpayer does, at this milestone point of devolution of taxation, need to have full confidence that they do have the information at their disposal in advance of April so that, when we do get to that point of tax devolution, we have the smoothest transition possible, and we get the successful tax devolution that everyone in this Chamber would want.

Dirprwy Lywydd, Nick Ramsay has made that point very consistently during the passage of both tax Bills, and in the Finance Committee, that certainty for Welsh taxpayers as we move into the new set of arrangements is very important, as is certainty for businesses. That is why I was happy to make that commitment to make an early announcement on the Government’s intentions in relation to rates and bands, and by announcing it on 3 October in the context of the budget as a whole, I think that that will assist people in understanding why we’ve come to the decisions we have come to. Alongside the budget, we will publish a whole new set of information that has not previously been available to the Assembly, including, for example, the Bangor business school’s independent assessment of the tax forecasting that lies behind the rates and bands that I will be announcing.

Thank you. UKIP spokesperson, Neil Hamilton.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. As my maternal grandmother was born in Moncton, New Brunswick, I’d like to welcome our distinguished guests in the gallery as well. It makes me quarter a New Brunswicker, I suppose. [Interruption.]

We’ve missed the cheery presence of the Minister for lifelong learning this week, because he’s at the Labour Party conference, where I see he said yesterday, further to John McDonnell’s announcement that Labour are going to end private finance initiative contracts and buy them back, that in Wales there is no PFI. But of course I’m sure the Cabinet Secretary will agree with me that that’s not quite correct. In fact, the total capital value of PFI contracts that are related to the Welsh Government amounts to £565 million, on which the total unitary charges—the amount that they will have all cost by the end of the repayment period—are nearly six times that at £3 billion. Does it not now make sense for the Welsh Government to look into the possibility of refinancing this on a more cost-effective basis?

Well, Chair, where my colleague Alun Davies was speaking from was the fact that, in the devolution era, we have not signed up to new PFI deals. The Member is right that there are 23 historic PFI deals that pre-date devolution, only two of which are actually ones for which the Welsh Government is directly responsible. Indeed, there are examples in Wales already where organisations that embark on PFI deals have come to the conclusion that they would move to other arrangements. So, we do not have a recent history that we have to unravel in the way that it has to be unravelled in other parts of the United Kingdom, and where other arrangements are better made we’ve also got a track record of seeing those arrangements alter.

I fully acknowledge that the record of the Welsh Government is far better than the UK Government’s on PFI contracts. Indeed, the total percentage of the unitary charges, the annual repayments, that are going to be made is only 1.7 per cent of the UK total. So, that’s a very good thing. But there’s still a substantial debt that is in gestation for repayment over many years, and reducing the costs of those repayments will, on an annual basis, mean that there is more money to spend upon other good things on which the public sector needs to spend.

Of the projects that are currently outstanding, there’s the A55 from Llandygai to Holyhead; the capital value of that was £100 million. There’s the Lloyd George Avenue and Callaghan Square development here in Cardiff; the capital value of which was originally £45 million. That’s nearly a third of the total outstanding projects by value, on which, for £145 million of capital provided upfront, the repayment costs are nearly £800 million. That’s an appalling deal and the sooner we can unravel these contracts the better.

The Member has accurately identified the two of the 23 schemes that are the direct Welsh Government schemes, and I don’t disagree with him in the principle of what he has said, that all these schemes need to be kept under review, so that if it is possible to rearrange things to the advantage of the Welsh taxpayer, we will always be open to doing that. As I said, there are examples of that already happening in Wales. So, we’re clearly not inimical to that possibility.

I’m very pleased to hear that answer from the Cabinet Secretary. Does he agree with me that the Blair and Brown Governments have a great deal to answer for, for the profligacy with which they entered into such contracts with abandon during those locust years, that although the Welsh Government can pride itself on its performance relatively speaking, the performance of Labour Governments at Westminster has been absolutely abysmal? Eighty four per cent of all the PFI contracts that have even been let were let under Blair as Prime Minister or Brown as Prime Minister. So, the Labour Party has quite a stain on its record.

Well, Llywydd, ‘Aliae gentes, aliae mores’, where other people are responsible for the decisions they made in the circumstances in which they made them. Here in Wales, we faced those same decisions from the very beginning, we took a different view, but the nature of the problem that we were seeking to address may have been different as well.

Thank you. Plaid Cymru spokesperson, Adam Price.

I’m very intrigued by this new broad front that’s emerging between John McDonnell and Neil Hamilton; I never thought I’d live to see the day, quite frankly. But, Chair, could I just delve a little bit deeper? I was very interested and listening intently to what the finance Secretary was saying. In the wake of the shadow chancellor’s announcement about bringing these projects back inside the public sector, is it now Labour Party policy in Wales, and therefore of this Government, to bring those existing PFI projects in Wales back in-house, and therefore onto the Welsh Government’s balance sheet in the event of the election of a Labour Government in Westminster?

Well, Chair, I’ll repeat what I’ve said earlier because it is very important to get the context of this right. The scale of the issue that we face in Wales is of a very, very different order to the scale faced elsewhere, and the recency of PFI schemes that we would have to address is very different as well. There have been only 23 schemes in Wales and very, very little new PFI in the devolution era, and of those 23, 21 of them are not the direct responsibility of the Welsh Government, belonging to local authorities and to the health service. But we are absolutely open to keeping under continual review whether or not those arrangements could be improved and a better deal secured for the taxpayer, and when we have the next Labour Government, then our ability to do that will be much enhanced.

Could we turn to the present, then? Because the Welsh Government obviously is involved in the use of public-private partnerships, yes, through the mutual investment model involving a minority share held by the Welsh Government, but the majority share, 75 per cent and above, is held by the private sector, using the Government’s own language, where

‘private partners build and maintain public assets’, and where

‘the Welsh Government will pay a fee to the private partner, which will cover the cost of construction, maintenance and financing the project.’

Similar schemes in Scotland have been described by the Scottish Labour Party as ‘PFI by another name’. Indeed, the contract for the new A465 project, which has just been laid, is based on the old NHS PFI standard contract. So, can the Cabinet Secretary say whether it is now Labour Party policy in Wales, and Welsh Government policy, to bring the 75 per cent or so of these projects, which will remain in private ownership, back into public ownership in the event of the election of a Labour Government at Westminster?

Well, Dirprwy Lywydd, I have never been anything other than clear that I have an approach to capital spending as the Welsh Government’s finance Minister in which my first recourse is always to direct public capital. I’d always rather finance capital projects in that way because that is the cheapest way as far as Welsh taxpayers are concerned. And if I was in the happy position of having sufficient public capital to be able to do all the things that are necessary to secure Wales’s future, including the things that we will do through the mutual investment model, then I would prefer to be able to go ahead in that way. When we have the next Labour Government, then we will be in a much better position to do just that. As it is now, I have to plan for the position I am in today, where we will have, in 2019-20, a capital budget £400 million shorter each year than it was a decade earlier, and urgent needs that have to be met. That’s the context in which we have had to be more imaginative about the way that we secure capital investment in Wales. If I didn’t have to do it, if I had conventional public capital at my disposal with sufficient amounts, then I would always use that first.

You raise another dimension: the creative asymmetry that sometimes, I think, characterises Labour’s policy position, sometimes saying one thing in Westminster or Brighton and another thing in Wales. We did have, I thought, a rather bizarre statement by the Labour leaders of the three largest councils in Wales, where they said they would support strike action by their own council staff against their council against a pay cap that they and their own Labour Government in Wales could lift. So, can the Cabinet Secretary say whether we he will join with his Labour colleagues in saying that he would encourage and support strike action in Wales by public sector workers, or is he prepared to lead by example and lift that pay cap as the Scottish Government has done?

Well, Chair, I read very carefully what was said by Labour leaders, and I see that Councillor Andrew Morgan was very clear in saying that his first priority was to avoid strike action, not to encourage strike action; that is our first priority. But he went on to say, as we would say on these benches, that where public sector workers have seen their wages held down year after year after year, and now find themselves going into the eighth and ninth year of austerity, that it is absolutely understandable that people feel that they have to make the impact that that has on their lives apparent to others. Our position in relation to the pay cap is as clear as can be. We say to the UK Government, ‘You must lift the pay cap. This is your policy. You are responsible for it. You must lift the pay cap, and you must provide the money that would allow public sector workers in Wales to find their wages increased in line with the value that we attach to the work that they do.’

Thank you. We return to questions on the agenda paper, and it’s question 3, Jayne Bryant.