It's an important point that the Member makes, and I want to repeat it again this afternoon, as I did last week, because these are absolutely serious times in the lives of citizens in Wales. The Welsh Government's budget is already worth, in purchasing power, £600 million less than it was in November of last year at the time of the comprehensive spending review, and the Chancellor has said that he has no intention at all of making up for that erosion in the budgets available to protect citizens and public services in Wales. And now we know that there are cuts on top of that on the way.

While the Welsh Government will use every capacity that we have, every pound that we are able to mobilise, every partnership that we are able to rely on, to do what we can to protect people in Wales from the impact of those cuts, there will be a limit beyond which we simply cannot go. And people will see directly and inevitably, not simply because their mortgages now cost astronomically more, not just because the energy protection that they were promised last week would last for two years is now only to last for six months, not only because the benefits on which they rely may be cut while bankers' bonuses are unrestricted, but they will see it as well in the services that they have been able to rely on up until now that simply will not be there in the same way, if we have to cut our budget on the scale that some commentators are predicting.

Llywydd, the biggest cut we've ever had to make in a single year came when George Osborne was Chancellor of the Exchequer. We had to cut 3 per cent of our budget, and we did it after 10 years in which our budget had grown every single year, year on year on year, real-terms growth, and then we had to cut by 3 per cent. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, last week, were saying that there would be a 15 per cent—a 15 per cent—cut in public expenditure, and this now not after a decade of growth, but after a decade of austerity as well. Nobody can pretend that people in Wales can be sheltered from the full onslaught of that, and that’s the message that I will be conveying whenever we have an opportunity—as my colleague Rebecca Evans did in her conversation with the latest Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the sixth one she’s had to deal with during the time she has been the finance Minister here in the Welsh Government.