Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:52 pm on 28 January 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:52, 28 January 2020

Llywydd, if I thought for a moment there was a lesson to be learned from the party responsible for the HS2 line and the billions—. He talks to me about £226 million; that's barely a week's overspend in his Government's handling of HS2, where there are billions—billions and billions of pounds. That's a project dreamed up by his party, entirely the responsibility of his party. He thinks that he can come here and criticise us for the way that we conduct things when his party is a scandal across the whole of Europe for the way that it has conducted itself in relation to that transport programme.

He quotes me a report of 2011. In 2011, we were at the very start of the year-by-year slash and burn through the capital programme of this Labour Government by his Government at Westminster. If we had the budget today that we'd had back then, we would be able to do more in a whole range of capital investments here in Wales.

I'm not apologising for the record of the Welsh Government: the Newtown bypass, completed on budget and on time; the work that we are doing in Valleys communities that his party would quite certainly never contemplate spending. In every part of Wales, this Government invests to the very fullest extent that we are able, despite the depredations of austerity that his party has imposed on us. And those things are appreciated—far from his carping away at the way things happen—those things are appreciated in every part of Wales as well.