Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:37 pm on 9 March 2022.
So, the question here relates to capital funding and the capital settlement, and the speaker referred to robbing Peter to pay Paul. That makes no sense whatsoever. We have a revenue settlement from the UK Government, and we have a capital settlement from the UK Government. We've deployed both in full. We've over-programmed on capital and we plan to draw down the full borrowing. So, there's no element of robbing Peter to pay Paul. What we do see in the capital settlement is the direct impact of the UK Government's very poor capital settlement for Wales. We'll see in the next three years our capital funding falling every year, as compared to this year. And that is just not the way to invest when we're coming out of a pandemic, needing to invest in infrastructure, in creating jobs, and to cut capital spending in those terms I just don't think is the way forward. Certainly, our local authorities are crying out for additional funding. And that's one of the reasons why, this year, I was able to provide an additional £70 million of capital funding to local authorities, which they can use to displace funding this year, they can put it into reserves and plan to spend it in future years. I hope that that will smooth some of the disadvantage that they will feel as a result of the UK Government's very poor capital settlement in the spending review.