11. What steps will you take to monitor the assessments undertaken by ministerial colleagues when allocating expenditure within their portfolios? OQ56442

It's the responsibility of all Ministers to take into account a range of factors, including impact assessments and value for money considerations, in setting detailed spending plans. These plans are monitored through the year as part of our in-year reporting process.

I'd be interested to know, Minister, what steps you take to monitor the expenditure by individual Ministers when you are looking at specific sectors that you wish to develop within Wales. For example, if Wales was to decide to try to become a science superpower, which is where I think we should be heading, and you wanted to put far more investment into research and development, into supporting our thriving research and innovation centres within our universities and within our medical establishments, how would you then tie that back to that principle by ensuring that Ministers that may be involved in that—e.g. health, education—do afford the right sums of money to help support that governmental goal? 

We do this in a number of ways, which are often underpinned by the ministerial sub-committees that we've set up. So, some of them are formal sub-committees of Cabinet and others are committees that are not formally created via Cabinet, but nonetheless operate in an important way. An example would be the work that we're doing on the inter-ministerial group that looks at digital and data—that clearly is a cross-Government agenda, and it's important that all Ministers are bringing to the table what they need to to develop that, to make sure that Wales puts itself on the map in terms of being a destination for digital skills, and also to use all of the investment that we are putting into digital in a way that delivers transformation for public services. So, I think that those structures that we have in place are really important, and from a financial perspective then it allows me to ensure that we create the right funding opportunities.

Within digital, we've worked across Government to pool budgets from different parts of Government to ensure that all Ministers are working to deliver that important agenda. We have similar work now going on in the recently—I say 'recently'; it's a year now—the recently developed land division. So, that's something that I chair, but it looks at all of the land held by Ministers in different portfolios across Government to ensure that we're maximising those for the shared purposes that we have. We have a particularly strong focus at the moment on releasing land for social housing, so we're looking particularly at land that sits in the economy department, what land there is suitable for social housing, and how can we best go about releasing that and building on that land.

So, there are ways in which we're working across Government in a number of areas. Those are two, decarbonisation would be another, and the work that we're doing across Government on support for renewable energy as well is something that really benefits from that structure that we've put in place to enable those cross-ministerial discussions, but also joint work in terms of budget, as well.