Thank you to the Member for those questions. I can confirm that I have had no direct engagement thus far with the Chancellor. I did have a meeting with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, but, unfortunately, it was after the Chancellor had made his statement. It's normal practice and courtesy, I think, for the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to make a call to finance Ministers across the United Kingdom ahead of the Chancellor's statement to give the headlines of that statement and have a discussion as to what it means for the devolved nations, but, unfortunately, that wasn't the case on this occasion, although I did have that call after the Chancellor had sat down after making his statement. I did make a few points specifically around investment zones. I sought further information as to what the UK Government's plans were for that—how they intended to engage with the Welsh Government on that. I made it very clear from the outset that, on any plans, we'll happily have those discussions and we will hear them out, but there will be nothing happening in Wales that erodes our workers' rights or that impacts upon our environmental standards and so on. So, we had that conversation.

I was also keen to probe the Chief Secretary as to why the UK Government hadn't provided a distributional analysis alongside the budget so that we could see very clearly the impact that it would have on the different income distributions across the UK. They hadn't done that work, but, of course, Wales Fiscal Analysis has done work to help us understand what it means for us here in Wales, and I shared some of that with you earlier on today.

I think another interesting fact that the Wales Governance Centre has shared as well is that there are fewer than 9,000 additional rate payers in Wales—so, those are those people earning over £150,000 a year. But, abolishing that rate will give them around £45 million, between the 9,000 people. So, clearly, again, it's a policy that is regressive. Imagine targeting £45 million towards those people who need it the most. So, those were the kinds of discussions that we had. We're due to have a finance inter-ministerial committee with all four nations shortly, and I know that we'll be picking up some of these discussions then.

I think we probably come to things from a slightly different perspective in terms of the role of the union in these times. I see being part of the union as an insurance policy when you're in economically difficult times, especially during a cost-of-living crisis. It should be the case that the UK Government is there to assist all parts of the UK, especially those that need it most. So, from my perspective, it's not the fact that we have a union that's the problem; the problem is that we have an absolutely dreadful UK Government in charge of the decisions being made.

I do think that there is plenty of common ground, though, in terms of maximising the fiscal powers available to us. I know that we both want to see increased and improved borrowing powers, for example. We want to see improved fiscal flexibilities available to the Welsh Government to help it manage and maximise its budget. So, there is some common ground there. In terms of any further devolution of tax powers, I think that we're probably quite a long way from that now, with a UK Government that is hostile to devolution, to say the least, and where we can't even get agreement on something as uncontroversial and as simple as a vacant land tax, which the UK Government has previously said that it wanted to pursue itself. So, we'll continue to make reasoned arguments and we'll continue to have the support of respected institutions behind those reasoned arguments, and I'd be, obviously, keen to work with colleagues who share that view across the Chamber.