Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:03 pm on 22 March 2023.
Thank you. I agree with the analysis, clearly. For those listening who are not as familiar as my colleagues are with the way this works, when a project in a wholly devolved area is announced in England, we would expect to get a population share of that funding. So, when a £100 billion project like HS2 is announced, we would expect to get a 5 per cent share of that, some £5 billion, if it only applied in England. If it's classified as being of benefit to England and Wales, then we don't get any funding. The Treasury are stretching all credibility in saying that HS2, which doesn't have a single mile of track in Wales and whose own business case shows it takes hundreds of millions out of the south Wales economy, does benefit Wales. It clearly does not, and certainly with the chopping off of the leg to Crewe, any thin case they had to make has fallen away. It is diabolical. As the First Minister said yesterday, the fact that the Treasury can arbitrarily, on a whim, decide how this funding is allocated shows that the way that we deal with finances within the devolved settlement is clearly broken.
There have been suggestions that the Northern Powerhouse Rail project will be similarly classified. That is not entirely clear yet. There are two options available to the UK Government: they could classify it as a Northern Powerhouse Rail project, in which case we would expect to get a Barnett share because it is an England-only scheme; or they could classify it as a Network Rail project, which would be outside of the Barnett consequential and we wouldn't get anything. We have not been able to establish which of these is going to happen. But the very fact it is opaque and not clear is in itself part of the problem. I met with the regulator this morning, the Office of Rail and Road, and it's clear right throughout the rail settlement that the decisions are made with an England focus and we then are given the crumbs from that decision. Our needs and our aspirations and our modal shift targets are not taken into account when rail spending across the UK is decided. So, this is yet another example of a broken system that needs to be reformed. And if the Treasury are foolish enough to do on the Northern Powerhouse Rail project the same as they've done on HS2, then they will contine to weaken the case for a sharing United Kingdom, because clearly they are not sharing, and it's an opportunity for them now to put it right.