I'm very pleased to take part in this discussion because I think we need to have more discussions in generalities about expected expenditure rather than talking about lines of expenditure and whether there should be an extra £10 to £15 million here or there, but actually talking about it as a general point.

I was also very pleased we had a finance meeting in Aberystwyth, meeting with members of the public. It was very helpful to me, because I met with people from the environment groups, from local government, and further and adult education, but I met with them outside what I would describe as my comfort zone of Swansea. It was interesting to have views from people in the same areas that I’ve taken an interest in and have a small amount of knowledge on, but who actually live in another area, and I certainly learnt a lot from that. I think the one thing that we should all remember all the time is it's the public's money we are spending. Far too often, we talk about Government money and we talk about Assembly money, but it's the public's money and we are responsible to them.

It was very interesting to talk to them. We talked about, basically, the effect of austerity and cutbacks on public services, that local government has borne the brunt of public sector cuts, whilst social care has the greatest pressures of any service—and I include health in that. Social care is under tremendous pressure. And it's so incredibly important. If you don't fund social care then people will end up in hospital. If you support them in their homes, give them that little bit of help they need, then they will not be falling, they will not reach that stage where they need to end up in hospital. So, you're actually helping health by keeping people in their homes.

The local government representative, coming from the Ceredigion/Powys area, was very keen to point out—and I wish Russell George was here, because he keeps on pointing it out as well—the cost of providing rural services, and they're absolutely right about the cost of providing rural services. I counted with him, and I count them in here regularly—they're the additional demand in areas where you have social deprivation. So, it's the difficulty of providing the services, and the demand. But, basically, we're not—. It's not a debate between Blaenau Gwent and Powys for the money; it's really a debate that we need additional money into the system.

Cutbacks have had a huge effect on education. Local authorities have generally tried to protect social services and education, but that's been at—. What's been affected? Library services, leisure services, leisure centres, sports facilities—all the things that are non-statutory services, they've been cut back. And some of the statutory services have been pared back. So, I think it really is important that we realise just how important these non-statutory services are in basically keeping people well and getting them out of the house.

The importance of school transport was highlighted—or, as the Conservatives have said in here fairly regularly, 'bureaucracy'; that money held by local authorities centrally that pays for school buses, they describe as money being held back for bureaucracy. I think that they need to give further thought to what money being held by local authorities centrally is actually being spent on.

Adult and further education—that again has borne more than its fair share of any cuts. Whilst we've given protection to schools and we've given protection within further education to 16 to 18-year-olds, those people who are going into—they want to stay on and retrain and reskill—. And we talk a lot, don't we, about giving people a second chance and people getting the opportunity to reskill in a changing world? Those courses have been cut dramatically, because the money going into further education is being cut dramatically, and what has gone in has been mainly aimed at 16 to 18-year-olds. That's been a conscious decision of the Government. In fact, they actually sent letters out saying that—that's not just of this Government now, it goes back to the 2007-2011 Government, who sent exactly those letters out.

On the environment, there was a call for more trees. I always call for more trees. I got into trouble with the Farmers Union of Wales when I said, 'We need more trees everywhere', but we need to protect the environment. The budget does not allocate anywhere near enough resources for environmental matters, and we also have the situation that Natural Resources Wales is massively underfunded. I don't think it was a good idea merging the three organisations together, and merging the three organisations together and then not funding them adequately has only led to problems.

I've got two things I would like to finish with. As we know, we've got real growth of 2.3 per cent in income next year. I would like to see the Welsh Government now say that no service will get an increase less than in line with inflation, and that includes every local authority. There is no reason why that can't be done, because you've still got the growth area to give to Government priorities, but let's protect everybody. 

We talk about preventive spend—and we always talk about preventive spend— can we put some money into public health? Because we lost the public health part of Communities First, which did a tremendous job on things like physical activity and promoting healthy eating, but we do need to get people better rather than waiting until they get ill and treating them.