Thank you very much to the opposition spokesperson for the questions this afternoon. I will just begin by reflecting again that it does seem to be the approach of the Conservative Party to entirely blame the financial situation that we're in at the moment on the pandemic and on Putin's war in Ukraine. But that's not the full picture, of course, because £30 billion of the hole that the UK Government is seeking to fill relates completely and entirely to the mismanagement of the economy through that ridiculous mini-budget. We will look back on it and—the damage it's done is just incredible. It's not just some ridiculous joke that happened by a bunch of clowns in Westminster, it's actually something that is having a real-life impact now. And we will be paying now and we will be paying long into the future for their arrogance and for the mistakes that they made.

Let's not let Brexit off the hook either, because the Office for Budget Responsibility has confirmed that recent data is consistent with its earlier assessment that Brexit is damaging our economy. The OBR expects that, under the deal that was agreed by the UK Government, over the long run, the UK economy will be at least 4 per cent smaller than would otherwise have been the case. Actually, the consensus amongst independent experts is that the economic costs could be even greater if the full range of impacts, many of which are difficult to quantify precisely, are included. Research that includes such impacts does find that the total costs could lie in the range of 8 per cent to 10 per cent of annual GDP. I think that we do have to be looking at the impact of Brexit, which we're only just beginning to start to feel, as part of the overall picture here as well.

What would Labour have done differently? Well, we wouldn't be in this mess had Labour been in charge because, yes, we would have had the pandemic, yes, we would have had Putin's war, but we wouldn't have had the implications of the mini-budget. So, a lot of the problems that people are being asked to pick up the tab for are entirely self-made by the UK Government. The way in which he's approached the budget also does put off a lot of the problems for the future as well. The fiscal tightening is heavily backloaded, with the vast bulk of those public service spending cuts actually pencilled in for after 2025, delaying all of the really difficult decisions until after the next UK general election. 

The Chancellor has also had to relax his fiscal mandate. He's pushed out to five years now the point at which he says he wants debt to be falling as a fraction of national income. The spokesperson talked about debt, and at around £100 billion a year by the end of the forecast period, spending on debt interest will be higher than spending on any single department in the UK Government, apart from the NHS, and that just shows again the long-term impacts that we're going to be facing as a result. 

The Member talked about some of the things that could be reasonably welcomed, at least in the first instance. The Welsh Government was calling for the increase of benefits in line with inflation. Even though the decision was taken by the UK Government to do that, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that that would still leave their real value on course to be 6 per cent lower than their pre-pandemic levels. That's equivalent to almost £500 per year for the average out-of-work person. Of course, that assumes that they are still able to access the full amount of support as they do at the moment under the energy price guarantee after next April. We've already heard about the impacts on disposable income for families: over the next two years, falling by 7 per cent. That's absolutely unprecedented, and we are going to be seeing those impacts feeding through to pressures, further pressures, on public services.

And we've also heard about the UK Government's approach to tax, and, of course, the UK Government has now announced those multi-year freezes to every major income tax or national insurance threshold, and, by freezing those thresholds, and particularly the personal allowance, the UK Government is raising income tax in now what is much more of a regressive way than if they'd just raised rates. And as more workers are now drawn into paying higher tax, a greater amount of their pay will be immediately lost, and, of course, because of the way the pay levels are here in Wales, more people in Wales are more likely to be worse off as a direct result of that particular intervention as well. 

So, in terms of our own plans, I will, of course, set out those plans when we publish our draft budget on 13 December. Now that we have those final figures from the UK Government—and I say 'final', because they could yet change ahead of or just after our final budget—we have an intensive period of work now across Government to provide colleagues with the numbers within which they'll be working and then to finalise our draft budget for publication.