The Finance Committee works hard to engage with stakeholders and the wider public as part of its budget scrutiny process. Nonetheless, during my intermittent membership of the Finance Committee, I have found a bit of a disconnect between the engagement that we have with stakeholders and others and the budget process. And I think it's a real challenge to engage people in a productive and useful way that feeds through to our scrutiny of a particular year's budget. 

I think a lot of that is because we have an Executive, Government, led budget process and we as a committee, as Assembly Members, to the extent that we meet stakeholders, who've come to perhaps push their particular priorities for spending, we engage with them and I think sometimes perhaps leave that meeting with the impression that the people invited expect more of us as a committee than we are likely to be able to deliver, because it's a Government-led process for the budget. 

I think there are also challenges in who you have to those meetings, how you can engage broadly. Do they favour organisations who employ people who have the time to go and join consultations and engage with Assembly Members in this way? How do we know we're giving fair priority to the different type of invitees and guests that we may wish to discuss their particular priorities? I think also, as we increasingly have devolved tax powers, another area comes into this. Whereas before we were largely block-grant funded—in fact, you'd lots of different people competing to tell you how important their area was for spending fed into a block grant-driven process where, largely, what we were about was dividing that spending cake. Now, we have increasing tax powers and, since April, 10 per cent of the income tax rate is set by us—what should we do to ensure that taxpayers are involved and consulted and part of that process and we consider that tax-spend trade-off rather more than we have when we've raised less of our own money?

The final area where I think there's a disconnect is the timescale. I think, when we look at the budget lines and go down to the main expenditure group level and perhaps below, what we hear from the stakeholders are very often their priorities about policy programmes or cross-cutting areas that don't necessarily fit neatly into one or even a combination of those different lines. Certainly, I find it challenging to take the lessons from stakeholders and then scrutinise the Minister in a line-by-line budget discussion for a particular year. And I think that plays into the other issue, which Rebecca Evans has spoken about here and elsewhere, about the difficulties she and the Government face with a one-year budget that they're putting forward because the UK Government has only put the block grant for one year ahead. I sympathise with much of what she says on that, but I would question whether it's a binary issue. I wonder if we could go a bit further in giving a little more certainty in at least some areas of spending. The UK Government itself doesn't know what its revenue is going to be in two or three years' time. It doesn't know when the money that we pay to the European Union is going to become available for other priorities. It has set some budgets for more than one year, and I think the Welsh Government could potentially, at least, set budgets for more than one year for some of its areas, or for particular priorities or areas where that certainty is particularly important.

I give way to Mike.