I very much welcome this first supplementary budget for 2021-22. It is an extraordinary time for this legislature and for the Welsh people never seen in peacetime. As we grapple with the climate change emergency and transformation, Wales continues to receive block funding 3 per cent below that of 2010 per population head. We face genuine insecurity over EU exit transition, financial ambiguity over lost UK transitional replacement funds, with former Objective 1 areas totally missed from UK levelling up funds, and what can be called at the very best a constitutional recalibration, contrary to devolution and our legislative mandate, and a real and chronic lack of fiscal flexibility and the missing comprehensive spending review. And throughout all of this, Llywydd, we fight the global pandemic itself, all it has meant for our people, our economy and our national resistance. 

I welcome being reappointed to the Welsh Finance Committee, and curtail my remarks to focus on recommendation 10 of the Finance Committee's scrutiny of the first supplementary budget. So, I have no hesitation in extolling the importance of local government in the delivery of vital services to people, often those most vulnerable in times of normality. The pandemic has demonstrated and evidenced how crucial local government has been in our recovery in pandemic logistics, in emergency co-ordination, administration and support. In short, local government has been essential to the Welsh fight against COVID-19.

Paragraphs 68 to 73 of the Finance Committee's report, pages 24 and 25, focus on local government in the first supplementary budget, and the final budget included £206.6 million to support local government for those first six months through the local government hardship fund. And that builds on over £660 million of additional allocation to local government in 2021. So, I was very heartened that the Minister confirmed that in addition to the funding for the local government hardship fund for the first six months announced at the final budget, the Minister has agreed an additional £76 million through the hardship fund particularly for social care pressures. 

The hardship fund has provided funding for free school meals, self-isolation payments and enhancements for social care workers' sick pay, and funded critical testing and visitor pods in our care homes, amongst many other interventions. And we know that this pandemic is not over, even though Wales has been kept safe by this Welsh Labour Government's cautious and epidemiologically-driven approach, and the immensely successful world-leading vaccination programme, ensuring that we are one of the most vaccinated nations on earth. And, as such, I very much welcome the Minister's comments to this place on 23 June that further funding could be allocated through the hardship fund, should it be needed, and it is indeed needed. The Welsh Government continues to keep Wales safe whilst ensuring that our Welsh finances, in the most trying of circumstances ever experienced by this legislature and our country, are in good order, and I support the approval of this first supplementary budget 2021-22. I urge all Members to do the same. Diolch.