Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:53 pm on 15 December 2021.
I think that the Senedd is always at its best when we find areas where we can all agree on and, previously, we have been able to find some cross-party and cross-Senedd support for various issues when we’ve needed to press the Treasury, and certainly within the context Brexit. So, I think there’s a lot we can do together to press these points about fairness, about ensuring that the statement of funding policy is more than just a document, that it actually is brought to life and is stuck to. So, we’re trying to work through that with Treasury.
I think that any efforts that UK Government can make to ensure that the new inter-governmental relations structure works would be important. And the finest place that they can do that, and the most important, would be through the finance structures. So, all of those points that you’ve described—HS2, European funding and so on—will be important. We can go on and talk about coal tips funding, for example. Even though we made really strong arguments, supported by Welsh society more widely, about the fact that coal tip funding should come from the UK Government as it predates devolution—all of those arguments were well made—that wasn’t the case and, of course, now you’ll have to see how we reflect funding for coal tips in the budget next week. But when we look at that, remember that that’s funding that we can’t be spending on infrastructure in areas for which we believe we are genuinely responsible. So, I couldn't really disagree with anything that Llyr Gruffydd has set out in his question there. And, if we can find ways to work together to put that pressure on the UK Government to do the right thing, then I'm always happy to look for ways to do that.