Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:18 pm on 18 October 2022.
Well, Llywydd, I was pleased to approve the strategic outline case that the health board put forward when I was health Minister. It said that the new facility could be provided at a cost of £22 million. By the time that my colleague Vaughan Gething approved the outline business case in 2018, the cost had risen to £40 million. The Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board papers reporting the full business case say that it's now risen to £64 million pounds, and that was at the end of 2020, so we can be absolutely confident that it's well above £64 million. So, the cost of the scheme has gone up by more than three times the original cost estimate. And, you know, it's inescapable that a scheme that escalates in costs in that way has to go through very rigorous scrutiny by the Welsh Government, and we do continue to look at the latest iteration of the case that the board has provided. As costs go up in the way that I've just reported, so available capital to the Welsh Government declines. In the current year, our capital budget is 17.5 per cent below where it was in the last financial year; it will decline by a further 2.9 per cent in the next financial year. It will go down from that lower base by 1.2 per cent in the next financial year, and it will go down again in the year after that. So, costs go up on the one hand, and the money available to meet those costs goes down on the other. That is not an easy position from which to take forward many necessary schemes of investment in the Welsh NHS.