I'm also very pleased we're having this debate prior to the publication of the draft budget. This means we're not replying to a draft budget, but putting forward suggestions for consideration. It also means other political parties can produce their own budget proposals. Unfortunately, up to now, all we get is demands for reduced taxation here and increased expenditure there. Can I urge the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru to each produce a budget so we can discuss it as part of the budget process, rather than just saying, 'We want to tax less and spend more'? It only needs to be headline amounts for the major spending areas and any changes in taxation.

This year's budget is going to be different because of the effect of COVID on it. COVID has changed the way many of us work and shop. Is this a short-term change? Are people going to leave online shopping and go back to the shops? Are people going to stop working at home and go back to their offices? We don't know. My expectation is that some will and some won't, but it certainly will be a change. The retail sector has faced large-scale business restructuring—85,000 jobs lost, over 9,000 store closures—but despite this, online sales continue to grow, reaching 21 per cent of total sales. Again, with homeworking: a trend from a slow growth in homeworking to a giant leap during lockdown.

There is a danger the Assembly agrees a budget that will work for last year, but will not work for this year—we're solving last year's problems. The first thing about a budget is what it's attempting to achieve, and I'll just say that we want a green, prosperous and healthy nation. Well, you're not going to be voting against that, are you? But I think that what we need to do—. What are we going to try to do and what do we disagree with?

Can I start with the economy? The provision of financial incentives to bring branch factories to Wales have produced very many unhappy endings. If you have to bribe a company to come here, I can tell you: they don't want to come. They're only coming because you're bribing them and if they get a better offer somewhere else, they're off. We all know of examples of this. Vincent Kane used to talk for 25 to 30 minutes about all of the companies that came and didn't produce the jobs that they promised and then ended up leaving. 

I remember a Government Minister saying that we have the best financial incentives for inward investment—probably true. They saw that as a great sign of strength—we were the best. I saw it as a sign of weakness. Put simply, if you have to offer a larger financial inducement than anyone else, then, when somebody comes, they will leave when somebody else makes a better offer.

What sort of financial incentives do they give in Cambridge? What sort of financial incentives are they giving in Silicon Valley? They don't, because people want to go there. Our problem is that we need to create an economy, we need to create a skilled workforce so that people want to come here. I'll give you two examples. Remember LG in the 1990s? The Welsh Development Agency's whole budget was taken to go and bring LG here. It didn't end very well, did it? Compare that with Admiral—a start-up company of seed funding. That's ended up very well. We need to grow our economy and for that we need to invest in education and use research paths and universities to grow the economy. That's what happens in the rest of the world. Why we aren't joining in, I don't know.

Money spent on education is by far the best economic development expenditure there is. With a highly skilled and educated workforce, companies will want to come here, without us having to say, 'Here's the money.'

A number of good things have come during the COVID crisis. Firstly, street homelessness has almost completely disappeared. I, and many others in this Chamber, do not want it to return post COVID. We've had long debates in here, cross-party, including you, acting Presiding Officer, about the fact that we don't want street homelessness and that we should be doing something about it. Well, COVID came, and we managed to. We can't go back. If we can deal with street homelessness during the COVID crisis, then we can deal with it in non-crisis times.

Secondly, we have provided food to children on free school meals during the holidays. I've been asking for this for as long as we've been here. This has happened this year. It must continue.

Thirdly, what we've seen during the pandemic is just how important local government is and how good local government is and how local government has performed incredibly well during this. 

Predictions: the health budget will receive the largest increase and the least scrutiny regarding outcomes. What will health do with the extra money? We need to have health outcomes and health improvements. Every intervention should improve the life of the patient. Too often, an operation is a success, the patient is unable to go home, so has to go to a nursing home. I'm not sure that that's a success, but I'm sure that hospitals and consultants will say that it is because the operation worked.

Finally, we need to protect habitat and the environment, and a lot of this is much more about attitude than about money. A lot of these things can be done with very little money, but real commitment, and I hope the Welsh Government will start thinking along those lines.