I welcome this opportunity to speak in this Finance Committee debate on the Welsh Government’s spending priorities for 2023-24, and drawing on the committee’s experience of its first ever budget scrutiny on the 2022-23 draft budget. The reason I'm speaking is very focused on the issue of justice, but I would say just in passing that it's great to hear the contributions already in terms of the way that young people and children have influenced and shaped, with their voices being heard within this Chamber already.

We decided as a committee, particularly with the addition of justice to our remit, that this was going to be a regular feature of our work programme. So, we do look forward in line with that to be contributing to the scrutiny of future Welsh Government budgets. On the matter of justice, we took great interest in the Welsh Government’s proposals for spending in this area during our scrutiny of the draft budget for 2022-23. We have also, of course, more recently seen the Welsh Government publish its work programme, 'Delivering Justice for Wales', which includes its plans across a great breadth of areas, including criminal justice, family justice, access to justice, the legal sector and civil and administrative justice. So, we are looking forward to seeing how this programme progresses, and, indeed, the Welsh Government has now committed on a number of occasions to regularly report on its progress to our committee and to the Senedd.

This is an area of real interest to our stakeholders as well, as we found when we engaged with legal practitioners and litigants in person earlier this year on the question of access to justice. Some participants in that engagement activity were keen to acknowledge the investment that has been made by the Welsh Government in things such as social welfare advice, following the implementation of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, but they said that further support was going to be needed to meet the demand that is out there.

So, to help us and our stakeholders and this Senedd, indeed, understand how much of the Welsh Government's budget goes towards spending on justice and where that spending goes, we have called for that spending to be disaggregated in the future. And we thank the Counsel General for telling us that the Welsh Government will now indeed explore the ways that it can improve the level of information it provides about justice expenditure, so we look forward to seeing the outcome of that. I don't know whether it's too early at this stage for the Minister to actually give us any update. I suspect it's ongoing. But thank you to the Chair of the Finance Committee for organising this important debate today, and we look forward to working with you and other Senedd committees as we scrutinise the Welsh Government's spending proposals this year and going ahead.