Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 1:45 pm on 13 January 2021.
Yes, I'd be happy to provide that update. You'll remember, last year, we published our first ever budget improvement plan and that set out some pieces of work that we would put in train this year in order to better understand the impact of the spend that we make, but also to allow us to take decisions that are better in terms of both gender budgeting, for example, but also understanding the carbon impact of the allocations that we've made. So, alongside the budget this year, you'll see several new pieces of work published. One is a distributional impact of spending on devolved public services in Wales. That's a new piece of work that we've undertaken to better understand the impact on the different socioeconomic groups in Wales. You'll also see the work that we've started to develop in terms of gender budgeting.
But, finally, the third part of the new approach is the pilot to model the estimated greenhouse gas emissions. And this is the first time that we've ever tried anything like this in Wales and it's very much in response to the concerns that you and others have raised in the Finance Committee and elsewhere, that this is something that you'd be interested in pursuing. So, alongside the chief economist's report, I did publish the initial exploratory work that the Welsh Economy Research Unit at Cardiff University had been commissioned to undertake for us, and they estimate the greenhouse gas emissions associated with Welsh Government spending. They did so in the first instance covering the largest revenue budget for the health and social services main expenditure group and that's based on last year's figures, but we do hope, between now and the final budget, to be able to get to a point where we've looked at this year's figures and also to look across all of the different MEGs as well. So, it's certainly not a finished product in terms of understanding our carbon impact, but it's definitely an important step forward in the way in which we demonstrate the impact of the choices that we make.