Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:55 pm on 25 February 2020.
Well, just to repeat what I said to Paul Davies, Llywydd: of course, lessons will need to be learned. In relation to NRW's logging operation at Pentre, my understanding is that, in clearing diseased larch from a small part of the wood there, NRW did what the current guidance would suggest that they should do, which is to leave some of the smaller debris that you get when trees are being felled on the ground, because that's how you protect soil from erosion when trees are logged, and it's how you protect biodiversity gain. So, they were acting within the rule book as it's currently constructed. The question has to be now asked: is the rule book fit for these sorts of events, should they happen in future? That's just one example of lessons learned.
The summit that we held last week, Llywydd, did its best to draw everybody who had had a part to play in responding to the floods around one table. That included Dŵr Cymru, as it included the third sector and the voluntary sector in part of that response to the flooding that Adam Price referred to. We will be looking to see how all those players think about the part that they played and whether there are things that they would want to do differently in the future.
NRW's budget, like the budgets of all public services in Wales, has had to be calibrated against the impact of 10 years of austerity. I probably should have said, in answering Adam Price's first question, about the impact of the flooding on capital expenditure in the future. Part of the reason why we are having to ask the UK Government for assistance is because with six weeks of this financial year left to go, the Treasury wrote to us requiring us to repay to them £100 million of financial transactions capital, and £100 million of conventional capital, before the end of this financial year. They said that they had recalculated Barnett consequentials, and that that money needed to be returned to them. When I say to the Prime Minister that I want money to help us with the impact of flooding here in Wales, I'm essentially asking him to hand back to us money that he took away from us in the last few weeks.