2. Will the Minister provide an update on the devolution of income tax? OAQ53308

The Welsh rates of income tax were agreed by the National Assembly for Wales on 15 January. Welsh Treasury officials are working with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs to prepare for their introduction on 6 April 2019. The recent Wales Audit Office and National Audit Office reviews concluded that implementation is on track.

Can I thank the Minister for that answer? Your probably think it's groundhog day and that we did have quite a discussion about this last week. We've been talking about the devolution of income tax now for some considerable length of time, and the reality will soon be with us. As well as the mechanical act of raising taxes, that also requires an accurate forecasting ability, and we know that that has been done at a UK level now for a considerable length of time, but we have very little experience in Wales of making those forecasts. What are you doing to build up the capacity of the Welsh Government so that we do have accurate predictive forecasting so that you're able to make the best decisions in the future? 

Thank you very much for raising this issue, and, of course, the importance of forecasting is to ensure that we're able to take well-informed decisions. And this is one of the reasons why the arrangements with regard to the provisions of data will be one of the items that we do set out in that service level agreement, which is currently being finalised between Welsh Government and HMRC.

HMRC will continue to provide us with monthly reports on pay-as-you-earn income tax liabilities via its real-time information system. This won't provide complete coverage of Welsh rates, but it will certainly be a very useful and very timely and consistent indicator of revenue collection. But they will also be publishing outturn information on it as part of the annual accounts in July, and that obviously gives us a fuller and more complete picture of what happened in the previous financial year. So, having that accurate data will be certainly something that we're working very closely with HMRC on, and it will allow us then to forecast and make the right decisions for future years.