The UK Government's Financial Announcement

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 2:18 pm on 18 September 2019.

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Photo of Rebecca Evans Rebecca Evans Labour 2:18, 18 September 2019

I thank Mick Antoniw for raising that. In terms of, 'Have we seen any of the money of it yet?', well, the answer to that is 'no', and there's no cast-iron guarantee that we will, of course, because it has to be subject to a finance Bill going through Parliament, and Parliament, of course, is not sitting at the moment. So, that's obviously an area of concern to us. So, we won't see a single penny of that until the necessary parliamentary processes have completed.

In terms of EU funding, again, the Chancellor was absolutely silent on replacement EU funding and the proposed shared prosperity fund. I asked the Chief Secretary to the Treasury about the shared prosperity fund and, again, it was pushed down the road—'There'll be consultation in future'. We've been promised that consultation for about 18 months now and we are really keen to engage in that. It shouldn't be right that we're consultees anyway, because this is so fundamental, but we continue to make those points that we cannot have a situation where devolution is bypassed as a result of that fund.

I did raise the issue of the fact that Wales should not be a penny worse off with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and reminded him that it was a key pledge during the referendum, but he replied, of course, that that was a pledge by the 'leave' campaign, and they are the Conservative Government, but then we reminded him that the Prime Minister is actually one of the people who led that campaign, so we would expect him to stick to that promise to the people of Wales.

Mick Antoniw is completely right to raise the fact that we've seen a decade of cuts and that the funding that we have now additionally put before us doesn't even begin to take us back to the level at which we were 10 years ago.