Diolch, and thank you to all colleagues for what I think has been a really, really useful debate. And there have been some incredibly constructive contributions, which I know that I and my ministerial colleagues, who will have been listening carefully, will be reflecting on as we move towards the final budget and move towards further decisions that we need to take in respect of supporting people in Wales through the cost-of-living crisis. And, as I said in my introductory remarks, I intend to say more on our approach to doing that very shortly.

But there have been so many important points raised in the debate, and obviously I'm not going to be able to cover them all in my closing remarks, but what I do commit to doing is ensuring that all of my colleagues and myself respond in full to committee recommendations ahead of the final budget debate, and I look forward to being able to do that.

So, I just want to pick up some of the points that were raised in respect of the context in which we find ourselves. Of course it's positive that we have a three-year spending outlook, but the figures that we have just don't undo that decade of austerity. And a number of colleagues have referred to the fact that the profiling of the spend over the next three years is very difficult with that front-loaded resource profile in particular, and the fact that between 2022-23 and 2024-25, our resource funding increases by less than 0.5 per cent in real terms. I mean, that is going to be challenging for public services as we move forward, and a number of colleagues have expressed concerns about that, and I share those concerns.

We've heard lots of calls for additional capital spending—lots of hand-wringing on the Conservative benches in respect of the capital allocations that have been made by the Welsh Government. But, the fact that we haven't been able to allocate as much capital as we would wish is simply a reflection of our capital budget handed down by the UK Government. Overall, our capital funding will fall in cash terms in every single year of our three-year spending review period, and will be 11 per cent lower in 2024-25 than it is in the current year. So, you know, if Conservative colleagues want to know why we're not investing more in capital in local government and in health, the answer is right there in the UK Government's spending review.

Colleagues in Plaid Cymru have pointed out this afternoon that our budget in 2024-25 will be nearly £3 billion lower than if it had increased in line with the economy since 2010-11. Imagine the budget we could be debating this afternoon if we had that funding available to us. And, of course, that doesn't even take into account the challenges in respect of the lack of EU replacement funding.

I do want to turn to borrowing and our capital programme. I just want to confirm that the draft budget does reflect our plans to maximise our capital borrowing, drawing the maximum annual drawdown of £150 million a year, borrowing an additional £450 million up to 2024-25. And that's the maximum that we can currently access in the fiscal framework as it stands, and of course we continue to press for further flexibilities in that particular area because it's really important that we maximise all of the resources at our disposal. And we will maintain our approach to funding investment by maximising the drawdown of the least expensive forms of capital first. So, as I described, typically using first our block grant settlement and then looking to borrow. But we'll only then move on to use those more expensive forms of capital financing once we've exhausted our general capital, of course. And innovative finance models, whilst they are clearly of interest to us, as you'll have seen through the mutual investment model, we would look to potentially deploy those as well, but only to do so in an appropriate way. And this is the first time that we're using the overallocation of general capital. That does, as Mike Hedges described, give us the opportunity, I think, to stretch every pound available to us, but it is a different approach to those that we've taken in recent years.