Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:14 pm on 23 November 2022.
The supplementary budget is going to be coming out very shortly, and you'll get all the detail in there. You will see the impact of the inflationary pressures, and they are way over anything that was in unallocated funding that you looked at in June. Every penny of our budget is needed. But even if we did have underspends, let's be clear that this could not be used to fund pay awards. This is time-limited and non-recurring funding. Reserves can't be used for everyday spending. They can only be used once, and they're held for emergencies. Responsible government also means preparing for the unexpected—for floods, for new COVID strains, for the cost-of-living crisis.
We've heard suggestions that we should cut back also on agency spend. I know there's a lot more we can do, and we must do, to drive down costs in this area, and we are working on it. But switching off the use of agency staff would have serious consequences if we did it very quickly in the Welsh NHS. We—