Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 13 December 2022.
The leader of the opposition, Llywydd, is utterly shameless—utterly without shame. He comes to the floor of the Senedd here when his Government in Westminster ended a meeting in acrimony with the Royal College of Nursing only last night, because they refused to put, as the leader of the RCN said, a single penny on the table to increase the pay of nurses in England, which would have led to, as they all know, a Barnett consequential that we could have used for pay here in Wales. That is the only way in which we are able to make a better offer here. We are tied entirely by the decisions that are made on pay by his colleagues in Westminster. That is the place that he should be lobbying. The minute that his Ministers are prepared to make a better offer for nurses in England, we will be able to make that offer here in Wales. If he is serious—I can't imagine for a minute that he would be— that we should divert all the money that we have received from the UK Government not for pay but to invest in the service of the NHS, that we should divert all of that away from sustaining the service and into pay, he should say that explicitly this afternoon, because people in Wales would be interested to hear that.