>Leader of the Welsh Conservatives Andrew RT Davies on what the Welsh Government should prioritise in its forthcoming budget. Political decisions made in Cardiff Bay have a real impact and Labour sadly often has the wrong priorities in mind when they set Wales’ budget.
We have just seen published, an update to this year’s budget ahead of Mark Drakeford’s first full budget in his second stint as Wales’ Finance Minister, expected in December.
If his previous budgets are anything to go by, don’t expect an early Christmas present from Mr Drakeford. Back in 2017, he cut council budgets and proposed new taxes including a tourism tax which will be coming in next year.
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We can see his handiwork already. How can it be right, in the context of significant cash and real terms cuts to schools earlier this year, that social justice (the department responsible for many of Labour’s ‘diversity and inclusion’ initiatives) is getting more funding as education suffers another £92m budget reduction?
A lot of this cash is returning to the reserves, but the argument I would make is for funds that are available, given the increase in resources to the Welsh Government, be used to repair and restore frontline public services that have been starved under Labour.
But I want to urge our new Finance Minister to chart a different course. Wales has suffered six record-breaking months of NHS waiting list increases. This is largely due to handover delays to the social care system.
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But you cannot address the backlog in social care and by extension the NHS, without empowering local government to deliver on the frontline.
Many of you will have seen that councils in Neath Port Talbot and Flintshire are under real threat of bankruptcy. This can’t be right and the problem lies with Labour’s outdated funding formula.
The local government funding formula needs to be replaced with a sustainable model that promotes fairness across the board and delivers top-rate public services with local referenda to avoid punitive council tax rises for residents. A Conservative plan to protect billpayers.
The Welsh Conservatives have also offered an innovative solution to mobilise the significant reserves held by some councils.
The Welsh Government should look to claw back a fraction of these significant sums, above a suitable threshold to ensure that there is that financial padding for real emergencies.
Some readers may also have seen coverage of the latest Welsh Government procurement card data, revealing a significant increase to £1.5m in spending on items such as luxury meals in New York, visits to Soho House in Hollywood and Dubai-based websites selling spirits and cosmetics.
Welsh taxpayers’ money deserve far more respect than this. As a start, we need strengthened guidelines for what is appropriate spending by officials and a full independent audit of all of this spending.
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This is basic financial prudence. Every pound of spending should have a purpose and that purpose should be making lives better for the people of Wales.
If we look top to bottom and employ a zero-based budgeting approach, we will be able to address the people’s priorities cost effectively. Mark Drakeford should do this.
This method will avoid Labour’s drift away from addressing Wales’ priorities and towards pricey pet projects.
Labour, theLib Dems and Plaid Cymru plans to create an additional 36 Senedd politicians comes with a gargantuan price tag of £120m, a sum that could pay the full time salaries of 650 new nurses in the Welsh NHS.
Ongoing work toward Senedd Reform is setting us back millions and that cost is about to triple even before those politicians are created.
Mr Drakeford’s basic income pilot is costing another £10.7m this year, a programme involving paying adults £1,600 a month with no strings attached. Nearly 10% of recipients don’t even live in Wales.
It’s hard to see the benefits of trialling UBI, given that rolling it out universally as the name implies would cost twice the Welsh Government’s budget.
The Welsh Government’s invest to save initiative requires a rethink and certainly a review, because despite this being exactly the kind of measure I would implore Labour ministers to adopt across departments, is seemingly suffering multi-million pound losses year after year – defeating the object.
So I would urge Mr Drakeford to look again at the budget and in December, adopt a new approach, starting with zero-based budgeting to ensure that every penny of taxpayers’ money is addressing the Welsh people’s priorities.