Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:35 pm on 12 January 2021.
Well, Llywydd, I'm afraid that the Member's calculator is accurate. And she's right of course—she set out the history of it. The Treasury made an announcement—I heard it myself on the radio—that there was an extra £227 million coming to Wales. That was, I thought, very good news—we would have been able to use it to top up the most generous package of support for businesses anywhere in the United Kingdom. And then it turned out a few hours later that, no, this wasn't extra money at all—we'd apparently had it already. Well, that really isn't the way to conduct business across the UK nations.
The Welsh Government will lay a further supplementary budget, Llywydd, which we'll put in front of the Senedd early in February. This will be the third time that Senedd Members have had a chance to see how the Welsh Government is using the money that is available to us in this extraordinary financial year. Finance Committee will be able to consider it, questions will be asked on the floor of the Senedd, and all the figures will be there, for all Members to see. The UK Government has not published a single supplementary estimate, in the whole of this financial year. And I think the Member makes a very good point about the importance of being clear with people, where the money is coming from, what it's being used for. We try and do that here in the Welsh Government, and we would have been helped, particularly over the issue that Dawn Bowden has referred to, if there had been some greater accuracy and transparency in the way the UK Government described the money, which in the end did not come at all to Wales.