All too often, the obvious thing to do in these debates is to list all the priorities that face yourself or your constituency. Rather than read out a list of areas where I believe additional spending would help Blaenau Gwent—be it education, health, business support, local government or even mitigating a disastrous 'no deal' Brexit, what I'd like to do this afternoon is to do something a little different and to focus on how I believe the Government should be approaching this budget round, and some of the actions that would flow from those points of principle.

Setting a budget today is very different to the process of setting a budget when I was first elected, 13 years ago, when essentially setting a budget simply meant taking spending decisions—decisions about where different areas of budget would be spent. Now, of course, we have to set a balanced budget and we have to look at how we raise funds as well as how we spend funds. And that demands a very different budget process. It also demands that this place acts in a different way. The Finance Committee has been investigating a legislative budget and financial process. I believe that time has come. The First Minister, in his evidence, said the time will come at some point. I believe the time has come today when we should be putting in place proper systems and structures of scrutiny for all expenditure and the raising of taxation. I do not believe it is right that we tax people in this country without passing a piece of legislation that sets the basis for that. We need greater supervision and greater accountability in terms of budget setting, and that means ensuring that we have a legislative budget round established here in statute, probably at the beginning of the next Senedd. And I hope that the Government will pay notice to that. 

But in taking it forward, I think there are certain principles that we have to be very clear about. A lot of people have talked about returning to normality after the COVID crisis, but let me say this: for many people who we all represent in this country, the old normal wasn't a very happy experience. It wasn't a very happy experience to be working two or three different jobs for the minimum wage, with terrible terms and conditions. It wasn't a very good experience to be living in poor housing, without any sense of a future that we could look forward to. We need a new normal that is better than the old normal—a new normal where we can catch buses and work in secure employment for a decent wage and decent terms and conditions. But we also need to ensure that sustainability is rooted right through the decisions that we take. 

I was very disappointed that previous finance Ministers—not the present incumbent—have refused point blank to include sustainability as one of the key guiding principles of Welsh Government budget decisions. I hope I'll have more luck with this finance Minister than I've had with her predecessors, but I would certainly argue that sustainability is key to it. But secondly, and thirdly also, are social justice, fairness, equality and understanding what the future is going to be. All too often when we set our budgets we look at what was spent last year and then we try to increase it a little bit or potentially decrease it a little bit next year. I think we need to look hard at what the future's going to be. We know that we're going to see significant industrial change in Wales as a consequence of technological change. We know that COVID has already changed the way that many of us behave, and some of those changes are going to be permanent. We need to be able to look hard and understand that future, and then take decisions that are rooted in the political principles of sustainability, of fairness and equality and social justice, and then take decisions on how we spend the money available to us.

But I also want to see tax policy as a central part of this. I do not believe that we can achieve our ambitions within the quantum of funding available from a Tory Government in London that doesn't share our same principles, our same values and our same visions, and we need to be prepared to argue that through a process here in setting a budget.

So, what does that mean in practice? Acting Deputy Presiding Officer, I want to see the Welsh Government investing in people, in places, in jobs, in quality of life. I want to see us investing in the future of town centres, which need to be very different to what they were when I was growing up. Those town centres that I grew up with in the Valleys are not going to be the same ever again. We need to reinvent that and we need to be able to fund that. We need to invest in our communities, so they're places where people can feel safe and where we people want to and enjoy living. We are also seeing a huge number of redundancies taking place up and down the country, and not just redundancies where we see the headlines, but people losing their jobs in small companies and businesses that don't grab the headlines, but together is changing many communities and many people's lives.

I hope that we will—and I won't test your patience, acting Presiding Officer; I'll say this in closing—that the Government can act with speed, agility and with urgency. We do not have the luxury of time available to us, and many of the people we represent do not have the luxury of time available to them. It isn't good enough to make speeches about what we want to see; we need a budget that will deliver what we need to see. Thank you.