Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:58 pm on 13 December 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:58, 13 December 2022

Well, I'm afraid that's a deeply confused question, Llywydd. It is the Scottish Government itself that published figures that showed that it had taken £400 million out of plans that it otherwise had to spend on NHS services and had transferred that into pay. Now, that is a perfectly legitimate decision for them to make. But they didn't find £400 million of new money; they took it out of things, and that's what he's got to recognise. They took it out of things that they had planned for the NHS to do: more operations, more ambulance capacity, more in primary care investment—all the things that Plaid Cymru Members advocate on the floor of this Chamber, week after week. And in Scotland, there will be less of that, as a result of the decisions that the Scottish Government has made. And, he says to me that we should follow them and that we should take £120 million out of the service of the NHS and use it to top up the pay of workers. Well, that's fine, he can make that case; we have stared at that case as well, and we have decided that, given the stresses and the strains that we see in the NHS every single day, where we see the need still to recover from COVID, with people waiting for treatments that they otherwise would have received, to take £120 million out of that effort and to put it in pay would not be the choice that we would make. I agree with what the shadow health spokesperson said in England; it was an offer too good to refuse. It's a matter of great disappointment, I think, that, when Steven Barclay had an opportunity to meet the RCN, he didn't find a way of making an improved offer to them, because we would then have had the opportunity to have made that improved offer here in Wales.