The Shared Prosperity Fund

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:09 pm on 26 April 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:09, 26 April 2022

Llywydd, I promised earlier that I'd assist Paul Davies further with figures that demonstrate the extent to which Wales has lost out as a result of the decisions made by his Government. I'll give him a preview of it now. Last year, the shortfall between what we would have received had we remained in the European Union and what we got from the UK Government was £328 million. It's £286 million in the current financial year, it'll be £222 million in the following financial year, and it'll be £32 million in 2024-25 when the UK Government claims that it will have got the shared prosperity fund to its maximum. That doesn't include, of course, the top-slicing of that money, the £101 million that will be taken away for the UK Government's Multiply scheme, and it doesn't include the £243 million that we will lose in rural funding. Nor does it include, Llywydd, all the other schemes that citizens of Wales were previously able to participate in and which will be denied to them in the future. So, it doesn’t include what we will lose because the Erasmus+ programme was not replaced by the UK Government to the extent that Erasmus+ operated in Wales; it doesn't include the money that will be lost to Welsh higher education institutions, because participation in the Horizon programme has not been secured; and it doesn't include the fact that we will lose the €100 million that Wales had at our disposal when we had an interterritorial co-operation programme with the Republic of Ireland, a programme that was particularly useful in Paul Davies's own constituency. We won't have that either, yet another part that we were promised would be replaced. We weren't, you remember, to be a penny worse off. Well, that's €100 million on that programme alone that people in Wales will not have at their disposal, which demonstrates exactly the truth of what Ken Skates said in his supplementary question.