Thank you very much, Llywydd. I'm losing my voice, I think. I can't overemphasise the significance of this statement. Announcing the budget is one of the highlights of the year in parliamentary terms every year, but the significance is even greater this year, as the Welsh Government has to budget in a difficult economic situation. I agree with the Minister about the economic mess that has been such a characteristic of the UK Conservative Government. It's left us poorer, hasn't it, in so many ways, with the poorest shouldering the greatest burden, and it’s left public coffers far emptier than they should be.

But despite that clear responsibility on Whitehall, the Welsh Government can't hide behind that entirely, either. This is the situation that we are facing; the cards have been dealt in this way, and it's the work of a Government that doesn't have its own sovereign Treasury, unfortunately, to prioritise within the spending envelope that it has. When that envelope has been set out so tightly, the work of setting the budget gets harder, and I acknowledge that, because, but that is the challenge.

I could spend some time painting another scenario where an independent Wales would have its own fiscal abilities, but that's for another day. What we do have to depend on now is innovation, fresh thinking, doing things differently. When we do face a strike from nurses, a strike by ambulance workers, both having reached their limit—not just now, but after years of a lack of financial support and otherwise—we do need to push the boundaries in terms of what's possible. We have to look at that bill of £133 million for agency nurses and think how can we bring that down, so that the budget today only has to find a few tens of millions to make a better wage offer to nurses, yes, to avoid a strike, something that we all and every nurse wants to avoid, but more than that, to show the appreciation that needs to be shown to nurses and that invests in the morale of the workforce.

That lack of morale, the numbers leaving nursing far too early, is a major part of what makes the NHS unsustainable, and it will be unsustainable if we continue to see the levels of sickness and sickness inequalities that we see in Wales year after year, decade after decade. Yes, the context of this budget is very, very difficult, but it hasn't always been so. The Minister paints a picture that specifically this year is an unprecedented budget, a crisis budget, where safeguarding front-line services is the priority. Of course, there is an inevitable element of that, but time and time again, the Labour Welsh Government has failed to change direction, has failed to innovate, specifically on something that means a great deal to me—it’s failed to invest in the transformation of services, genuine investment—genuine investment—in the preventative agenda, keeping us well, tackling inequalities genuinely. Without doing that, we will be in this situation again. We'll be facing this situation time and time again. And when the financial situation is tight, as it currently is, that cost of failing to transform the health of the nation is going to become an increasing burden, as it currently is. 

Of course hospitals are full, of course there are long queues of ambulances outside those hospitals. Of course social services are struggling. Perhaps one day we will have a budget that does try to cut that vicious cycle, rather than having to deal with the acute cases. This isn't that budget, I'm afraid. Yes, there is an economic mess, and yes, that mess, made by the Conservatives, is the basis for this difficult context, and the wider global context too, but that's why innovation by the Welsh Government is more important than ever before.