Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:15 pm on 9 July 2019.
We will also be abstaining on the substance of this motion on the supplementary budget. However, can I compliment the Government on its much improved presentation of the supplementary budget? I recall three years ago, having recently been elected to the Assembly, the first supplementary budget that I encountered. I had hoped that my experience, in terms of looking at UK Government budgets or English local government budgets or private sector budgets of one sort or another, might stand me in good stead for the role of assessing and interrogating the supplementary budget, but it didn't to anything like the degree that I had hoped. And, given at the time, I was on the Finance Committee and chairing the climate change committee, the largest I think, or certainly the most controversial element of the budget was to implement much of the UKIP manifesto in the area of slashing climate change projects. A little of that money was then put back in the second supplementary budget, but it was substantial, and it wasn't immediately easy to interrogate what was happening. I am pleased to see that not just the main expenditure groups but the budget expenditure lines are now on the Welsh Government's website for people to interrogate in a coherent way.
Also, I think this is a very good document that we have associated with the budget. It is referred to on our system as a note, and I think elsewhere as document; in the annex it's described as an explanatory note, and I wonder if, in future, it could be headlined as that as well, so that we know what it is we're referring to and this can become a regular part of the process, because I did find it helpful in understanding what the various changes are within it.
The most exciting changes, in some way, for me, are the absence of changes on the revenue side, and I think it's actually quite significant, because we've had six months that have gone past since the final budget. And, other things being equal, one might have expected some variance in the forecasts for the Welsh rates of income tax, the land transaction tax and the land disposals tax, given the uncertainty around forecasting those. And I'm not sure whether the reason we haven't seen variance may be because we haven't got the processes fully set up that we're now seeing with the Office for Budgetary Responsibility that's going to be assisting Welsh Government in forecasting those, or whether, genuinely, they've been looked at in detail and everything is exactly as the finance Minister expected, but I do recall, between the draft budget for 2019-20 and that being finalised, there was a £40 million reduction in the forecast for what we were going to take from the Welsh rates of revenue tax, so, very significant. And, of course, in Scotland, they have this £1 billion black hole they're dealing with. So, how confident are we of those zero variances?
I see that we have saved £173,000 on the administration by HMRC of those two new taxes, and having served on the committee for both of those and looked at those numbers and thought that they were relatively generous to HMRC in terms of what the costing was going to be, my fear was that that money would just be spent by HMRC. So, the fact that they have found savings and have given them back to us is to be welcomed. We also have the £100,000 funding for the OBR, which I think will be well spent and we must keep that under careful review.
On the allocations from general capital reserves, we say at 3.10 of the document I showed that a total of £85 million has been allocated from capital reserves to provide additional investment in social housing and trunk road and motorway maintenance. Firstly, can I just ask, is it non-controversial to describe maintenance of roads as capital expenditure? Is there an argument that that should properly be considered revenue resource, or is it a well-worn assumption within our accounting that that's the way it should be treated?