Health and Social Services Portfolio

Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance – in the Senedd at 2:03 pm on 24 January 2018.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:03, 24 January 2018

I thank the Member for the question. She is, of course, absolutely right that we have a far smaller exposure to PFI schemes in Wales than any other part of the United Kingdom. The average annual cost per head of PFI schemes in Wales is well under £40 per head, and that's around a fifth of the cost per head for the UK as a whole. Where administrations took a different view, there is, inevitably, a consequence that they have to make provision for. In Wales, the annual charge for PFI liabilities is below 1 per cent of our budget. In Scotland, my colleague the finance Minister has to find 5 per cent of his budget annually to meet PFI liabilities. I well remember, Llywydd, in the very early days of the Assembly the difficult decisions that my colleague Jane Hutt had to make in the PFI field as a result of inheriting schemes when the Assembly was very first established.

I've explained to the Finance Committee previously that I have a hierarchy in mind always in capital expenditure. My first recourse, always, is to use public capital, because that is the cheapest money that we will ever have, and I will always use that first. There are then other means that we are able to deploy—borrowing powers that we now have, funding local authorities and housing associations to borrow in the way that Jane Hutt established, and then, beyond that, the mutual investment model. But, as far as possible, we use public capital in the health field as our first resort, and where we are unable to meet all the needs that we know are there in Wales, as, for example, in our determination to create a new cancer centre at Velindre, then we will use other means to ensure that people in Wales get the services they need.