Unallocated Funding

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:17 pm on 9 March 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:17, 9 March 2021

Well, Llywydd, I don't think this Government will need any lessons from the Member on additional transparency. This is the third supplementary budget that we have laid during this financial year. It sets out in absolute detail all the way in which the funding that is available to the Welsh Government has been used. His Government, his Government in Westminster, did not publish a single supplementary budget, and it was only when, very late in the year, many weeks later than they promised, when the estimates were produced, that the additional funding was provided and, sensibly at last, the Treasury agreed that it was too late in the financial year for that money to be sensibly used and that it could be carried forward into the next financial year. That is exactly, therefore, what my colleague Rebecca Evans proposes to do. 

We have reported faithfully and regularly on every spending decision that we have made to the Senedd, quite unlike the performance of his party at the UK level. Of course we will publish an outturn report. That happens every year, as a matter of course. We have to report on the final outcome of our budget, and we will do exactly that. It's a great disappointment to me that the Chancellor refused, and continues to refuse, to allow us any additional flexibility with our own money, Llywydd. That is what we have asked for when it comes to the Welsh reserve. We haven't asked for a single extra penny from the Chancellor; we have simply asked that the money that we have as a Government can be managed by us in a way that would maximise the value of that public money at the end of the financial year. Instead, we continue to be treated by the UK Government as though we were simply another Government department, rather than a Government and a Senedd in our own right. And I think that is just another example of the way the UK Government continues to refuse to recognise the realities of the United Kingdom 20 years into devolution.