Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:30 pm on 11 October 2022.
Thank you very much, First Minister. We woke up this morning of course to the news from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that there's an unfunded £60 billion hole in UK public finances as a consequence of decisions taken by the UK Government—not as a consequence of war in Europe, not as a consequence of COVID, but as a consequence of their own decisions. Before we'd finished breakfast, the Bank of England had announced that they were expanding the intervention to maintain some stability in markets. First Minister, do you agree with me that the conclusion we've reached is that either the UK Conservative Government is entirely incompetent on public finances and can't be trusted to run public finances, or they're doing it deliberately, as Simon Clarke indicated a few weeks ago, when he said that we need a smaller state to align with a low-tax economy—tax cuts for the rich paid for by cuts to public services for everybody else? First Minister, this Government needs to protect the people of Blaenau Gwent in the way that it needs to protect the people of Wales against this incompetence and this conspiracy against the public sector. I hope that the Welsh Government can ensure that you can do all in your powers to protect the public services in which the people Blaenau Gwent want to see investment and not cuts. Thank you.