Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 15 June 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:00, 15 June 2021

Well, Llywydd, again, I don't demur for a moment about the urgency of the crisis that we are facing. The Cabinet met yesterday and agreed a proposal from the finance Minister as to how we will create the budget for next year over the summer and bring proposals to the floor of the Senedd in the normal way in the autumn, and that will be the way in which we will create the budgets that we need for the many, many different demands that there are on our public services. The one thing we will not be able to use, Llywydd—and I've had this discussion with the leader of Plaid Cymru in the last Senedd—is Government bonds, because Government bonds do not add a single pound to the spending capacity of the Welsh Government. All they offer you is a different stream of funding to the funding streams we have already, and they don't add to it. They're just a different way of funding, and, actually, a more expensive way of funding, much of the expenditure that we use. But, in the system that we have, for every pound that you raise through a Welsh Government bond, you lose a pound of money that comes to us in capital expenditure from the UK Government. So, it's not that they are a bad idea in themselves, and we've taken some steps to be able to create to Welsh Government bonds, were they to be cheaper than borrowing money from the UK Government. But what they don't do is to add to the total amount of money that you can spend, and therefore they're not an answer to some of the challenges that Rhun ap Iorwerth has quite properly raised this afternoon. The sums of money that we have, for the purposes for which we are responsible, are fixed through the Barnett formula and the decisions that the UK Government make. I hope that the UK Government will be true to its commitment to climate change and everything that was said in Cornwall last week and in preparation for COP26. Then we will see the flow of investment through to Wales that will allow us to do more and to do more things more quickly, just as we would like to do.