Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance – in the Senedd at 1:38 pm on 16 May 2018.
Wel, Llywydd, Jane Hutt make a very important additional point, because our anxieties about the shared prosperity fund, if it were to be done in the wrong way, are not simply that Wales might lose out financially through a bidding or Barnett-based system, but if a shared prosperity fund was seriously to be attempted to be run out of Whitehall, then where are the troops on the ground that the UK Government could rely on to make effective use of that funding?
Twenty years into devolution, it is the Welsh Government and other Welsh bodies who have the experience of regional economic development and of making sure that funding streams that come to Wales can be properly aligned with one another so that we get the maximum impact from it. And one of the small advantages that some of us think we may gain from not being in the European Union is that we would have greater flexibility to make sure that funds that came directly to Wales could be used in greater alignment with other funding streams for the future. We are in the right position to do that. The UK Government simply does not have the wherewithal In Wales to do so, and the points that Jane Hutt made about aligning our funds with other programmes is very important.