Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:50 pm on 6 March 2018.
By this stage in the financial cycle, I feel that the Cabinet Secretary is a bit like the man who follows the Lord Mayor's show with a shovel to tidy up the streets after the main event. So, although we voted against the main budget, like Nick Ramsay I can say on behalf of my party that we will not be voting against this supplementary budget. Although it does make some substantive changes, a lot of it is just tidying up.
We certainly support the additional £30 million for Welsh-medium education to provide a capital funding stream for the Cabinet Secretary for Education in future years, which is an essential part of realising the Government's objective of having a million Welsh speakers by 2050. I certainly support everything that the Chairman of the Finance Committee said also, and, indeed, Adam Price, in relation to understanding the methodology by which changes in priorities have taken place, even though they are at the edges of the budgets concerned, in relation to the broadly stated objectives of the Government in documents like 'Prosperity for All'.
I'd like to commend the Cabinet Secretary also for the evidence that he gave to the committee in this respect and his obvious willingness to work with the committee in that respect. Certainly, the main thing that came out of the consideration of the budget in committee for me was the evidence that we received in relation to the overspends in the national health service and the local health boards. This is clearly an endemic problem, and I had sympathy with the Cabinet Secretary at the time with the difficulties that it causes him when we have these unplanned deficits, which, therefore, constrain the Government in other areas as well. Given the importance of health to the public at large, and the scale of health spending as a proportion of the Welsh Government's budget, any significant overspend by local health boards is bound, therefore, to have repercussive effects on other parts of the budget.
Sadly, things do seem to be getting worse rather than better, because, in paragraphs 25 and 26 of the committee's report, as we say:
'The aggregate position for all Local Health Boards for the three-year period to 2016-17 was a net overspend of £253 million', and, for the period to December 2017, the defict was £135 million, with
'an estimate for the full year...of over £170 million', which compares with an actual deficit for the previous year of only £147.8 million. So, this is clearly something that needs to be dealt with on a longer term basis than merely in a supplementary budget, so I hope that there will be some recognition of this in the next full budget next year—clearly, it can't be dealt with in this supplementary budget.
So, with that, I'm at my three-minute limit, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I will show an example that others may not have done to keep to the suggestion that you made. So, we will, therefore, be abstaining on this vote.