Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:22 pm on 22 January 2019.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:22, 22 January 2019

Dirprwy Lywydd, we do indeed, of course, have a capital investment strategy. It was refreshed last year, and I came on the floor of the Assembly, as Finance Minister, to set out the additional investments that we were making as part of the Wales infrastructure investment programme. The single biggest investment that we will make as a Government over the course of this Assembly term is the £1.4 billion that we will invest in our housing programme, to deliver 20,000 affordable homes additionally here in Wales. Beyond that, we have the south Wales metro, a major capital investment programme here in south-east Wales; we have the twenty-first century schools programme, putting more money than ever before in schools and colleges, to make sure that they are fit for the twenty-first century; we have the single biggest ever investment in a single health project at the Grange university hospital; and we have a pipeline far beyond that.

I've set out in front of the Finance Committee many times the strategy that I followed in capital investment, always using the cheapest form of capital available to the public purse here in Wales first, but going beyond that in a series of ways, through innovative investments in capital, including the mutual investment model. I wish that there was more capital available to this Welsh Government, because we have ambitions that we would be allowed to bring forward if the UK Government was prepared to invest in Wales, instead of continuously falling back on programmes that it has announced and then letting Wales down.