Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:47 pm on 23 June 2021.
I thank you for those questions. I always aim to be as absolutely transparent as I can be and I'll give my commitment to be as transparent as I possibly can be in the course of this Senedd as well. That's one of the reasons why we published three supplementary budgets in the course of last year. We were the only part of the UK to do that, because it was important to me that people understood where the money was coming from and where we were allocating it to.
In terms of repurposing funding, in the last financial year, I undertook an exercise with colleagues across Government to scrutinise their budgets and explore what could be returned to the centre to support the COVID response. That came forward with around £0.25 billion of repurposed funding. You'll find the details of that in our previous supplementary budgets, but largely it was in relation to activities that could no longer take place because of restrictions. So, they weren't cuts in the traditional sense, if you like, there.
But we've also been fortunate; because of decisions take here, things have cost us less to deliver, which has meant that we've been able to deliver more. A good example, I think, is our test, trace, protect system, which has been delivered by local authorities, by health boards and other public service partners here in Wales, and has delivered excellent value for money on top of being a really top-class service. Those are the kinds of decisions that we took here that allowed us to get a service for less financial outlay, but also a good service, and then allowed us to repurpose additional funding elsewhere.
We've said really, really clearly in our manifesto that we would not be looking to raise Welsh rates of income tax for as long as the economic crisis continues, and certainly we are absolutely in that crisis at the moment.