Of course, in 2010, the UK budget deficit was the worst in the G20, behind only Ireland and Greece in the EU. Though, if we’d sought to increase the deficit faster, we’d have had greater cuts imposed upon us. If we’d sought to reduce the deficit more slowly—sorry, the other way around. If we’d increased the deficit by spending more, we would have had higher debt If we had borrowed, or sought to borrow to spend more, we’d have had bigger cuts imposed on us. After all, those high-deficit nations, which rejected austerity, got it in full measure. The top tax rate since 2010 had been higher every month in all but the last month of Labour’s previous 156 months in power. The top earners are now paying a higher proportion of tax than ever before on record.

But moving to this report, the chief economist for Wales, as the Cabinet Secretary has indicated, has produced a report alongside this. This says that home building has important longer run economic effects and Wales has not been building enough new homes. It also refers to the UK not building enough homes, but, clearly, that has been a significant problem with house building falling to the lowest level since the 1920s in the first decade of this century. It also says Wales has seen rapid growth in housing costs over recent decades and evidence suggests a low supply responsiveness, i.e. not building enough is a large part of the problem, applying to both private sector and housing associations. Of course, during the first three Assembly terms, the number of new social homes provided in Wales fell by 71 per cent as waiting lists multiplied. By 2009-10, Welsh Government had the lowest proportional level of housing expenditure of any of the four UK nations. By 2012, the ‘UK Housing Review’ said it was the Welsh Government itself that gave housing lower priority in its overall budget. In 2013, Wales was the only part of the UK to see house building go backwards and it’s continued to lag behind since.

The Welsh Government has an unambitious target to build 20,000 affordable houses, which of course doesn’t mean social houses, it just includes a small element of social housing. It includes assisted home purchase and intermediate rent for people who earn higher than the levels of people who would be eligible for social housing and otherwise at a time when successive reports by independent bodies have said we need between 12,000 and 15,000 houses, or new homes, should I say, annually in Wales if we are to break the housing crisis, which didn’t exist in 1999. So, what consideration has the Cabinet Secretary given to how to break that housing crisis with a new housing deal for Wales that engages the whole sector?

Eight years after a Wales Audit Office report found that Communities First had failed to operate with effective corporate governance controls, financial and human resources controls and audit trails, six years after the Wales Council for Voluntary Action report, ‘Communities First—A Way Forward’, which said the missing ingredient was community engagement, and after £0.5 billion of expenditure on the programme, the Welsh Government announced this summer that the scheme would not be replaced, the record of its work in Wales in most deprived areas had been mixed, and that the figures aren’t moving.

So, how does the Cabinet Secretary, in terms of how to allocate budgets, respond to the statement at the launch of the Co-production Network for Wales last May, May 2016, by the director of social housing for Monmouthshire, who said, ‘We used to tell people what they can have. We now ask them what they want to achieve’, moving from needs-based to strength-based approaches? I know personally the Cabinet Secretary believes strongly in this, but I don’t believe that perhaps in the budget allocations they fully reflect the need to move to a process that tackles a situation in which people and communities can feel passive recipients of services rather than active agents in their own families’ lives.

In terms of prevention and early intervention, which are key to the Welsh Government and opposition agendas, and to your own legislation, there’s no actual definition of prevention in the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014. The Red Cross has highlighted that, in England, they’ve been monitoring the prevention duties, looking at how local authorities are implementing them, and highlighting concerns and problems there. But how has the Welsh Government estimated what funding local authorities in Wales will need to meet their prevention duties, and how has this been reflected in the draft budget? And how is the Welsh Government working with front-line providers and people who work with them who receive the services to ask how by perhaps investing more in those services you can reduce multiples more in terms of cost to statutory service? Thank you.