5. Will the Minister provide an update on funding for the invest-to-save scheme for the 2022-23 financial year? OQ57735

Yes. The invest-to-save scheme budget over the next three years stands at £7 million. This budget is a result of repayments being made in respect of previous investments. So, the budget from 2022-23 to 2024-25 is approximately £25 million, which includes £4 million capital.

Can I thank the Minister for that response? As Members here will know, I've been very supportive of the invest-to-save scheme and the innovate-to-save scheme over a number of years. They've been provided for several years. Can the Minister explain how successful schemes are rolled out across sectors and how many schemes that are planned for next year will be based on previous successful schemes? My fear is that some excellent invest-to-save projects take place but we do not learn from them, and the benefit that could accrue to the public purse by doing it throughout Wales just accrues to the one place that does it the first time. 

Yes, as Mike Hedges says, he has long been a champion of invest-to-save and also innovate-to-save, and has been actually very challenging in terms of how are we demonstrating that this good practice travels. So, as a result of that, we did commission Cardiff University to undertake a piece of research for us so that we could really understand the experiences of those schemes.

There were some particular barriers for the travelling of good practice that were identified as a result of that research, including the availability of the finance—so, once a scheme comes to an end, do other organisations have the ability to undertake similar work? Obviously, there are some things that we can look at there in terms of responding to that. The availability of staff resources with the right skills to implement change was another challenge, alongside senior leadership support for the implementation of change, the willingness to take risks and the extent to which they take on board evidence from other schemes, and then finally contractual commitments, of course, which might mean some changes would incur financial penalties if they were broken. So, those are challenges that that piece of research has recently identified for us, and which we need to consider now as we start moving forward with schemes. But I will say that in 2022-23 we are investing in a significant carbon reduction project in Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, and that follows on from many of the other initiatives in health boards across Wales in respect of carbon reduction, so we've learned from those smaller schemes and are now implementing it in a larger scheme.

And our focus now is on proposals that further the programme for government agenda, and we'll be using the experience from those past schemes to help these initiatives, and I look forward to providing an update on these before too long.

Minister, I was very privileged to sit on the Finance Committee when it considered the invest-to-save scheme back in 2013, and Members universally recognised the merits of the scheme in helping to deliver better value for money for our public services.

Now, as we look forward, it's absolutely crucial that projects that receive invest-to-save funding achieve efficiency savings in the long term, and so, Minister, building on the question asked by the Member for Swansea East, can you tell us what the Welsh Government is doing to test the effectiveness of completed projects and to assess the effectiveness of the invest-to-save scheme more widely, to make sure that lessons are actually learned for the future?

Yes. We do evaluate the projects that are funded through the scheme, and that helps us understand where we go in future. Of course, not every scheme is a great success; that's part, I suppose, of the point of these kinds of projects, that we test out what works, and we've had some that in the past that have less successful but part of the challenge then is about learning why it didn't succeed and what we can do differently in future.

Where we have seen some really good progress is in the schemes that relate to supporting children and young people who are in care and who are care leavers, and that's a particular area where we're looking to invest in future. So, there's some work going on at the moment that social care officials are leading on to identify what we can be doing in this particular space to support care leavers with that innovate-to-save model.