Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:06 pm on 20 June 2018.
Thank you for the statement, Simon. Part of me thinks that I wish this had been a debate because it would have given me the opportunity as the relevant Commissioner standing here today to pick up some of the points that Mike Hedges and, in fact, Nick Ramsay have made, but the question I wanted to ask you relates actually to what you were saying at the end there, Simon. The situation is going to be this: as you know, we can't use the underspend for our investment fund anymore; if we want the building to be looked after and so forth, we need an investment fund. If we add an investment fund to the bottom line, as things look now, particularly including the remuneration determination, over which we have no control, as you said, the chances are very strong that our bottom line will go over the amount by which the block grant has gone up, and the reasons for that will be partly because of the remuneration board determination, and we don't know what that's going to look like, and partly because some of that is going to have to go back, so the spend will look less than the bottom line in the original budget. So, I wanted your reassurance on this, in as much as we've committed to staying within the block grant increase, that the Finance Committee won't be coming back to us in whatever period it is and saying that we've exceeded it, when it's through no fault of our own. So, that's the reassurance I was seeking.