Thank you, Llywydd, and as the Cabinet Secretary for Finance has just outlined, this is the first time for us to look at the budget in this way—a new approach for the Government and a new approach to budget scrutiny as well—because the Wales Act 2014 introduced fiscal devolution to Wales, meaning that the role of the Assembly now is to hold the Government to account, not only for its spending plans, but also its plans to raise revenue through borrowing and taxation on property and landfill waste, and of course income tax in due course as well. As such, we agreed to change the budget scrutiny process to ensure that the Finance Committee was afforded the opportunity to consider the high-level proposals of the Government in terms of its priority spending and revenue, and of course that every other committee could look at their individual budgets for Government departments. That’s what you have in the Finance Committee report and the reports by the other committees today.

One of our main considerations in the Finance Committee was the new powers around taxation, and how these new fiscal powers will be used. We’re grateful to the Cabinet Secretary for providing details of his proposed tax rates alongside the draft budget documentation. The information provided alongside the publication of the outline budget proposals included the chief economist’s report, the Welsh tax policy report, and the report from Bangor University. As the Cabinet Secretary has acknowledged, on the whole we came to the conclusion we found the information provided to be comprehensive, and this aided our scrutiny of the budget. And we’re also grateful to the Cabinet Secretary for confirming minutes ago that Bangor University will continue their work, and update the work following the budget of the UK Government, which has just been published. It was of great help to committee when scrutinising these high-level issues.

Some concerns were expressed over the transparency of the overall local government funding prior to the publication of the settlement. In future years we would like to see the strategic integrated impact assessment explain more in terms of how decisions had been prioritised and reached. Additionally, one issue that is a continuing theme from our scrutiny last year is the information available within the draft budget in terms of how the Government’s commitments are prioritised and fed into the budget allocations. We concluded that we’d also like to see clearer links between the draft budget, the programme for government and the 'Prosperity for All' strategy—and this, of course, all rests within the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015.

It wasn’t ideal that the UK Government budget was published in the middle of our scrutiny of the draft budget. We’ve just had an outline of the problems faced by the Government from the Cabinet Secretary, but as a committee we still think it’s helpful to have details around the Welsh Government’s intentions at an early stage. We also felt it would be helpful to have indicative figures for future years, although we accept that this may be difficult depending on comprehensive spending reviews; it is helpful to have detail provided where possible, and of course it’s happened in the past.