Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:50 pm on 13 May 2020.
Thank you for those questions. It's always nice to see you as well, Mark Reckless. The £500 million spend that we put in place for the economic resilience fund was brought together as a package of funding from different parts of Government. So, it included financial transactions capital, for example—£100 million of that. It also included funding that we were able to free up from elsewhere in Government, so I'm not aware that there is a great deal that the UK Government is doing to support businesses that Welsh Government isn't. However, I'd be keen to explore that.
One thing that we've been trying to do is use our additional funding to close the gaps in support. So, there are some significant gaps in support for business by the UK Government, which the economic resilience fund seeks to do. I'm really aware that there continues to be gaps, which is why the fund has been paused, so that we can consider how we can potentially look to fill some of those existing gaps, whilst also considering how we can focus some of that additional funding on the recovery as well.
In terms of furloughing, Welsh Government wrote earlier this week, actually, to the Chancellor on the issue of furloughing, and we really welcome the fact that the scheme has been extended. Some of our concern really though is that the scheme shouldn't have any reduction of support for businesses that can't legally open. So, there could be a time when businesses in certain sectors still can't open. So, those businesses, I think, should continue to be protected. And the scheme should continue to offer the same kind of level of intensity of support to tourism businesses, I think, in particular, because we have a larger proportion of them here in Wales. Obviously they have been hard hit and they are telling us that they're facing what's effectively three winters, one after the other, in terms of the kind of profits that they will be able to make.
We're also keen that the job retention scheme in future has some more flexibility built into it. So, the Wales TUC has asked for businesses to be able potentially to claim as workers come back on a part-time basis, and so on. So, all of those things, I think, are important considerations. The UK Government has agreed that it will be discussing with the devolved nations the next steps for the scheme, and I understand that a meeting with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury is being arranged for next week, so I look forward to continuing those discussions then.
In terms of how it will all be paid for, I think that is really going to be quite a difficult challenge for the Chancellor, moving ahead with various different options, of course, in terms of whether it means long and sustained austerity. We saw the leaked report earlier on today. So, I think the most important thing—really that has to guide us—is that it can't be the people who are on lowest pay and the poorest people who continue to bear the brunt of this. It seems incongruous that you would be looking to freeze public sector pay at a time when we're all celebrating how important our public sectors workers are to us, and these are the people who are keeping us going at this time. I wish I had a crystal ball, but I think that there are going to be very, very difficult challenges ahead, and difficult times for the economy, as we've seen in lots of the commentary and the projections that have been published.
On land transaction tax, I don't think that we will see a great divergence. I've asked officials recently, actually, to look at how we can safely reopen the housing market here in Wales, but clearly we won't undertake those steps until we are confident that it is safe for us to do so here. But, this is one of the features of the fiscal framework that we have. Potentially, we could see a negative adjustment were we to have a larger impact on that here in Wales, but we'll keep that under close review.