Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:42 pm on 17 September 2019.
Well, First Minister, you should be on the stage. The way that you managed to put a negative spin on those statistics without breaking into even a wry smile, you're to be commended on that. I hear what you're saying that there has been a period of cutbacks in Westminster, which saw cutbacks in the Welsh Government budget as well for a period of time, but even you must accept that the recent spending review will deliver next year, like it or not—it will deliver—a real-terms increase of 2.3 per cent over and above the money that's currently in the block grant coming to Wales. That's around £600 million a year, as Dave Rowlands referred to. If you look into the deeper figures of that, that's around £195 million that's being earmarked for education in Westminster, £385 million earmarked to health. Your advisers will know this as well as I do.
Can you give us a guarantee that it's up to the Welsh Government now to decide how you spend that money? Can you give us a guarantee that that money will be passed on to the public services in Wales that need it most, so that you can get on with the job, which you were charged to do, of defending public services in Wales, of defending the Welsh way of life, because people in Wales haven't always been convinced that that's happened in the past? You have a golden opportunity here, in a perfect position, to prove people who are negative wrong and to show that you can stand up for public services in Wales.