Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:52 pm on 8 December 2021.
Minister, taking up that exact point, Wales could lose out on £5 billion due to being excluded from Barnett consequentials for HS2 spending. This, as you'll obviously know, represents around 5 per cent of the total expended expenditure of the project. It could, of course, be much higher if the cost spirals, which is likely. In the words of the Western Mail's Will Hayward,
'The decision to count HS2, a once in a century investment, as England and Wales spend has condemned Wales to another century of a second class rail network.'
Even though the decision to exclude Wales from this funding, as you've been setting out, Minister, was made by a Conservative UK Government, past Labour Welsh Governments have also contributed to this mess. There was a decision in 2005 to refuse the devolution of rail, described as the worst decision in the history of devolution. And there was the inability, in the past, to understand Plaid Cymru's argument on HS2 a decade later, with Carwyn Jones insisting that Wales was receiving its HS2 consequential, even though setting the HS2 comparability factor for Wales at 0 per cent would see our comparability factor for Department for Transport spending plummet in the future, which is what we're seeing now. I'm sure that the current Labour Welsh Government is keen to—