Well, there are political choices here, Llywydd, and there are also hard facts, and it is simply a hard fact that you cannot spend one-off money to pay for recurrent bills. Now, the Welsh Government has written to our trade union colleagues making sure that we are able to go on talking to them. We've put a package of measures together. I'm glad that we will have a meeting with our trade unions on Thursday of this week.

One element of that package involves the offer of a one-off non-consolidated payment in this financial year. The amount of money that has been brought together for that has been hard-won over the Christmas period, in which Cabinet colleagues have all had to look at plans for spending in the final quarter of this year and agree to ways in which that could be reordered to release money to support that offer. But that is money available only in this financial year.

We will discuss with our trade union colleagues; that is the right place for us to discuss the quantum of money that is able to be found, and then we will discuss with them the best way in which that money could be dispersed amongst our public sector workers.

So, it is interesting that Plaid Cymru has joined the Welsh Conservatives in suggesting that the way to finance public sector pay in Wales is to raise taxes even further than they are already on the Welsh population. The leader of Plaid Cymru is right that that is a political choice, and that is a political choice that this Cabinet rehearsed in detail in the lead-up to the draft budget. There was a moment—a brief moment, as you know, when Liz Truss was Prime Minister—in which there were plans to reduce the level of income tax across the United Kingdom, and that did, I believe, open up a realistic possibility that we might have been able to raise income tax rates in Wales without disadvantaging Welsh citizens next year beyond the position they are this year.

Welsh citizens will pay higher taxes next year, Llywydd, than they have for the last 70 years. They're being asked to do that in the teeth of a cost-of-living crisis where they are already struggling to pay fuel bills, energy bills, food bills and other bills too. This Cabinet looked to see whether we should take more money out of their pockets by raising taxes, and decided that that was not a sensible course of action. That remains our view and, therefore, it's not a course of action we will follow, to find one-off money this year and to find recurrent money next year by raising tax levels even higher in Wales.