I congratulate the finance Minister on her budget and the process she's used. I'm noting, just from Rhun just then, that his remarks were quite gentle in admonishing the UK Government for the shifts in timings of its budgets and how those have been communicated, which contrasts what we heard earlier in the Scottish Parliament, where there seems to have been a serious ding-dong about the complete disrespect for the Scottish Parliament, apparently and profound consequences and catastrophic risks that the change in timing will lead to for them, which appears to be that they expected their budget to come after the UK one but before 11 March, which is their legal date for the local government funding. So, I don't quite know how they're going to sort it out, but what we seem to be doing here seems to be more sensible and with somewhat less drama than what we're seeing there.

I note that the finance Minister says that she'll deliver the certainty and stability that Welsh public services need through doing this, and we then get the UK budget on 11 March. Given that she's bringing down the £125 million from the Welsh reserve, can I ask, is that a standard approach going forward or is that informed by her knowledge that the UK budget is coming later and, perhaps, an expectation that there may be further Barnett consequentials coming through following 11 March? 

I've criticised the finance Minister before for her emphasis on complaining about austerity when she's not complaining about Brexit. There was a bit less of that today. I did, though, note a tweet from BBC Wales Politics at 11 o'clock last night saying,

'The UK government must take responsibility, says @fmwales', and I sort of clicked through it to see what story he was commenting on or what he thought they should be taking responsibility for, and there was no story behind it. It was just a general comment of applicability. I wasn't even sure what it was meant to relate to.

But I think what people in Wales want to hear is what is the Welsh Government doing with the levers at its disposal. Of course, it doesn't have all the levers. Of course, there's been a period where public spending has been less than the completely unsustainable trajectory that it was on previously, but given the cloth we have, how are we cutting it and what are our priorities? And I'm not sure whether I saw a slightly wistful look on the First Minister's face in terms of the budget that his finance Minister's got to present is giving a lot more money to a lot more different areas than he was ever able to when he had that role. 

I think we need not just to look at the comparison to 2010, which the finance Minister is always so keen on making, but what's the increase we're having this year. There's a complaint about the £36 million or £50 million that's not coming through for pensions, but where in this statement is the reference to what is the overall Barnett consequential, the extra money we have to spend in Wales next year because of the decisions that have been taken by the UK Government and by the relative improvement in the economy compared to the unsustainable trajectory that we got on to spending before? 

I don't see in this budget what the Welsh Government is communicating on its core priority, particularly on the biggest spending areas. We hear from the Conservatives a lot of condemnation, but I felt that a few years back, at least, there was actually a Conservative critique of the Welsh Government's spending that had a degree of internal consistency about it, that relative to England, they had cut spending on health. I saw the First Minister's reaction to the suggestion of there being a cut, but, certainly, relative to England, in Wales, we or the Welsh Government have chosen to implement austerity by being less generous to health and more generous to local government than has happened in England, and that is by far the largest budget and financial decision that has been made. Yet, this year, when the restrictions come off, when we have significant money to hand out, the amount handed out in percentage terms is almost the same to health and to local government, so I can't determine from that where the Welsh Government's priorities are, and I note that there have been reductions, but the reductions that have been made in English local government are hugely greater than those that have been made in Welsh local government. I do ask whether there are further opportunities for efficiencies in Wales that haven't been taken that have been in England. I accept the comments that are made around social care and the interaction with the NHS. I think that is a fair comment, but it does not explain the whole difference in the approach that's been taken.

And I'd ask why, in Wales, are councillors paid, I think, £13,868 this year? Next year, will that be more than £14,000? Why are councils not allowed to make savings in that area? When I served in my local council in England that was facing big reductions in spending because of austerity, one of the first things we did was to cut the councillor allowances to far lower than those that we have in Wales. Yet we continue to have 22 councils, we continue to have a much larger number of councillors who are paid a very significant amount of money. Is that not an area where we should be looking for savings?

The Government talks a lot about its prioritisation of climate change. I recall the first budget of this Assembly, where I was wearing multiple hats, and the Welsh Government announced very substantial reductions to its spending on climate change projects. What I ask the First Minister and the finance Minister is: could we have, in comparable terms, what Welsh Government is planning to spend now compared to what it was going to spend then? I remember the uproar, a modest proportion of those cuts were put back. Where are we now compared to then and can we try and consider that on a comparable basis, both in capital and revenue terms?

I felt Rhun made a very good comment around the prioritisation of climate change spending, and I really am concerned that we do not know what is the relative benefit of those different types of spending. So, we've got investment in active travel, in the electric bus fleet, ways of building homes; what are the relative yields in terms of the impact we can have on emissions of spending in those different areas? Some electric buses—I'd love to see more of them, not least because of the impact on air quality, but they are very expensive, and there's quite good evidence that home insulation and looking at the energy efficiency is a very effective way of reducing emissions for relatively limited spending. But we have this national forest for Wales—sounds great, we're spending a certain amount on that, we're also spending a certain amount on planting trees in Uganda. What is the relative return from the spending in those areas? Surely, Welsh Government should be investing in research to try and understand that, looking at best practice elsewhere, making those comparisons so the money is, at least, spent in the most effective way possible, rather than looking instead to put it into a communications campaign so we can campaign back to those who are campaigning for us just to do more about climate change. What we need to do is look into what measures are most effective for the amount of money we have available, and I hope Welsh Government will push in that direction.

I wish them well with the budget, we look forward on the Finance Committee to looking in greater detail on Thursday with various interest groups, and I hope Welsh Government will take note of what is said by those. I also hope it will look to build a better and more effective budget process going forward. I believe that the process we have for spending in the Welsh Parliament now is better than the one that they had in Westminster. I am not convinced it is yet for tax, but I hope that the Finance Committee and Welsh Government will be able to work together in terms of looking at the medium-term plans for what is the best way for us to run budgets in this place in future. Thank you.