Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance – in the Senedd at 1:55 pm on 24 January 2018.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:55, 24 January 2018

Well, Llywydd, it was Marx who said, 'The older I get, the older I want to be'—but, of course, that was Groucho Marx rather than Karl Marx. The Member is absolutely right when he says that the national insurance fund became a fiction in around 1957, when the Macmillan Government of the time decided to dip into it and to pay for current expenditure out of the receipts that had built up in the fund. Ever since then, national insurance is, in fact, a pay-as-you-go system rather than an insurance-funded system. Professor Holtham's report is very clear that the scheme that he wants to advocate would be one in which money that Welsh citizens might pay for social care purposes in future would have to go into a dedicated fund outside Government, in which there were strong assurances for members of the public that Government couldn't reach into it in times of difficulty, and where there would be strong governance arrangements around it to give people the confidence that, if their money is being paid over for these purposes, that money would be there to be drawn out for these purposes in the future.