Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:32 pm on 8 February 2022.
Llywydd, I think it is just worth reminding everybody what the Conservative Party said in their manifesto at the general election of December 2019, and which was repeated by them in the comprehensive spending review announcements of October last year. This is what they said:
'The UK Shared Prosperity Fund will at a minimum'
—at a minimum, Llywydd—
'match the size of EU Funds in all nations, and Cornwall, each year.'
Well, Wales would have received £375 million in funding in this calendar year from European structural funds. What will we actually get? Forty-seven million pounds. How does anybody, Llywydd, believe that £47 million, when we would have received £375 million, represents, at a minimum, matching the size of EU funds each year? And, of course, Rhianon Passmore is right that that promise, that absolute guarantee, as we were told in the Chamber here, has simply been abandoned. The UK Government now says that it will count towards the money that they will give us, money we have already got from the European Union. Now, I'm not saying anything about fraudulent use of money, but I'm absolutely saying that that argument is fraudulent—the argument that you can count money you've already got towards money that they promised they would give us is simply not to accurately describe what is going on here.
Now, what will the Welsh Government do? Well, Llywydd, what we will definitely do is to continue to uphold different standards here in Wales than we have seen across our border. Members here will remember that, in April of last year, the auditor general published a comprehensive report into the provision and the procurement of PPE, here in Wales. The report said that it had showed how in Wales we had been able to avoid the problems reported in England. Well, on top of the £4.3 million lost in fraud from business funds—remember what Lord Agnew said:
'a "lamentable", "woeful", "desperately inadequate" refusal by the UK Government to tackle fraud'— last week, the National Audit Office in England published its report on PPE procurement in England. The comptroller general said that he had not been able to obtain an assurance that, of the nearly £9 billion that had been lost on PPE in England, there had not been a material level of that loss that was down to fraud. Well, there you have it, Llywydd: a very, very direct comparison of the way things have been done in Wales. That money then available for us to invest in supporting businesses, in supporting the communities in the Islwyn constituency, compared to the ways things have been done across our border.