I'm delighted to follow Mike Hedges because I think he made some very important, as well as some very sensible points about the need to spend more on preventative health, so that we reduce the burden that the NHS is going to have in the future. I would like to see, as he would, the priority given to spending in this area increased within the current Welsh budget.

I should also welcome the Finance Minister to her post—I don't think I've had the opportunity to do that on the record in the Chamber as yet—and to congratulate her upon the assured start that she's made, both in giving evidence to the Finance Committee and today in this Chamber. I wish her well in her job, and I hope I shall be able to continue the constructive arrangement that I had with her predecessor as Finance Minister, where, from our different political perspectives, nevertheless, we can combine together to seek the common good for everybody in our country.

Against the background, of course, of so-called austerity, and given the nature of the current situation, whereby the Welsh Government is overwhelmingly dependent on a block grant from Westminster, the degree of freedom that the finance Minister of Wales has is inevitably limited, and the big ticket items are always going to gobble up the major share of the budget. Health is now half of the budget, virtually. Local government is getting £4 billion out of the current budget, and education another £2 billion. There isn't much that one can do about those figures, so what we are arguing over in these budget debates, generally, is the very small minority of discretionary spending projects that the finance Minister has to decide between.

I, personally, don't think that the Government's policy of retrenchment—the UK Government's policy, that is—is a political choice. I think it's an absolute necessity. In 2010, the Government was borrowing an amount every year equivalent to 10 per cent of our gross domestic product. That clearly was totally unsustainable, and it's had, over the years, to whittle it down. This year, it's at a more sustainable 2 per cent. I don't regard a borrowing figure of 2 per cent of GDP as austerity. I mean, that's the long-term average that the British Government has had. That is just living within your means, which everybody ultimately has to do, unless you are going to embark upon the kind of Zimbabwe policy of simply printing money, which ends up in destroying the economy eventually, because after a while, of course, you run out of other people's money to spend, effectively. So, I think that a policy of prudence, which is what Gordon Brown preached 20 years ago but then departed from disastrously in the early years of this century, is one which is vitally necessary. Having said that, Wales has fallen down the scale, as was pointed out today by my colleague Gareth Bennett, in First Minister's questions, and now languishes at the bottom of the list of nations of the UK and regions of England, having been overtaken by Northern Ireland in the last 20 years. And there is still significant pockets of poverty in Wales—it's not just the poorest part of the United Kingdom, but one of the poorest parts of western Europe—and the Resolution Foundation estimates that the poorest tenth of households in Wales will be £30 a week better off as a result of tax and benefit changes in 2019-20, which is a 0.33 per cent rise, whereas the richest tenth will be £410 a week better off—a 41 per cent rise.

So, in terms of inequality, Wales is actually going backwards rather than forwards, and the Welsh Labour Government has a policy of attempting to reduce inequality, but that is simply not happening. We know, as was pointed out earlier on by Leanne Wood in her questions, that there are pockets of unemployment in Wales that are very significant indeed. In the year to June 2018, unemployment was substantially above the Welsh average in Rhondda Cynon Taf at 7.2 per cent, Caerphilly at 7 per cent, and Cardiff, surprisingly, at 6.8 per cent. It's especially high amongst young males—14.7 per cent for Wales, rising to nearly one in four of 16 to 24-year-olds in Rhondda Cynon Taf, and 21.6 per cent in Neath Port Talbot. 

So, we still have a lot to do as a Government in Wales to alleviate poverty, and relative poverty as well. The only way we can do that, as Mark Drakeford alluded to in his response to Gareth Bennett earlier on, and as I've advocated many times before, is to grow the Welsh economy by using the new tax powers that we have imaginatively to encourage wealth creation—to encourage more rich people to come into Wales, if you like—and to set up businesses and to expand existing businesses. Fifty years ago, Singapore was a small offshore island in Malaysia with an average income of $500 a year; this year, the average income in Singapore, the richest country in the world, is $55,500. That has not happened by accident; it's happened because of the policies of the Singaporean Government.

So, I commend the finance Minister on her promising start, and I hope that she will perhaps take some of the points that I've made on board, and we'll be able to agree on more in the years to come.