Wales’ finance minister Mark Drakeford has said Plaid Cymru’s position on his recently announced budget is “baffling”. Mr Drakeford, laid out how he plans to spend Wales’ £26bn of money for the next financial year on Tuesday, December 10.
He announced a “brighter” future with funding for schools, the NHS, councils and a fund for potholes. Last year as First Minister, Mr Drakeford oversaw a budget which involved millions of pounds of cuts in almost all departments. This year – as finance minister – he announced rises in every department. There is, he said, £1.5bn extra for the Welsh Government to spend and for the first time ever capital spending plans will exceed £3bn at the draft budget stage.
However, because Labour has exactly half of the seats in the Senedd it needs support of another political party to pass the budget when the vote takes place on March 4. On the morning of the draft budget, Plaid Cymru’s finance spokeswoman Heledd Fychan MS said her party would not do a deal with Labour. The Conservatives have never done a deal, which could mean the deciding vote falls to Jane Dodds, the sole Lib Dem.
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With no support, it could see Wales lose £1bn of funding, the First Minister has said. During the Senedd debate on the draft budget, Mark Drakeford told the Senedd Plaid faced a “day of reckoning” if it did not back the budget. You can read more on that here.
Speaking to WalesOnline afterwards, Mr Drakeford expanded on those comments, saying the party’s position “baffled” him.
Ruth Mosalski: In practical terms, what difference can people expect to see from this today? Because headlines of ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ means nothing to normal people.
Well, thousands and thousands of people will find themselves being treated and treated more quickly. There will be thousands more homes built for rent for all those people we know are waiting in unsatisfactory accommodation, or who even have been homeless.
There will be many, many children in every part of Wales who’ve been waiting for additional learning needs support. Who will get it as a result of this budget? This is a budget that will be felt, as you say, not in the abstract, but in terms of hundreds of millions of pounds. But the way that he would reach into the lives of people living here in Wales and in every part of our nation.
There’s a huge capital sum for health, but also a huge [maintenance] backlog. Is this going to just get eaten up by fixing things like the rotten roof at Prince Philip, or closed wards at Bronglais?
Undoubtedly there will be some of that money that will be needed to put right the neglect that absence of capital budgets has created over recent years. But it will be far more than that. It will be new equipment, new facilities, there will be new digital possibilities that will allow the health service to be more productive and efficient in the money that it’s already got.
Because now we will have the wherewithal to do that.
So yes, there will be some bits that will be fixing the roof because now we’re able to do that. But there will be new investments and will create the future of the health service and allow the revenue we have, the people we employ to do more, because now they’ve got the things that allow them to succeed.
The cross-section of responses from unions, etc. has been fairly warm. Equity is one of the ones in terms of arts, that’s said ‘you’re not listening to us’. Oxfam have said that this isn’t enough for women and children because there’s not enough enough childcare. How do you respond to those two?
On childcare there’s £20 million extra in this budget for next year. We will look between draft and final to see whether there is support elsewhere in the Senedd to do more than that. But £20 million is not something to be…that will make a serious difference.
On the arts, there are uplifts for the arts next year. They don’t make up for all the cuts that we’ve been forced to make over the last couple of years but there is a very significant injection of capital into the arts as well. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here
There’s no doubt at all that some arts organisations have ended up using their revenue budgets for capital expenditure, they won’t need to do that in the future. That money will go back into the running, day to day running of the arts.
I was very careful to say on the floor of the Senedd, you cannot make up in one all for all the difficulties we have faced in the last 14 years. This is definitely a step in the right direction for the arts. It’s a start of that journey, not the end of it.
Your words were quite animated then about Plaid Cymru saying it will be a ‘day of reckoning’. You don’t expect the Tories to do a deal with you, don’t expect a Tony Stewart deal with you. It’s between Plaid and the Lib Dems, I presume?
I am baffled by that, because the Plaid spokespeople after one another said to me that there wasn’t enough money for…and there’s a long list of things, so they have to vote against extra money that is there. [They say] £253m isn’t enough for local government so they’ll vote that they don’t get anything at all.
I think it’s utterly baffling to anybody who’s listening and it isn’t serious politics. If you’re a party that aspires to be in government, you have to be a party that is prepared to do the hard work that being in government means. Gesture politics, and voting against something because it doesn’t give you everything you want, when it’s actually offering you quite a lot of what you say is needed is not serious politics and that’s the challenge for Plaid Cymru.
Now, finally, are you confident there can be a deal with someone.
This is the 26 year of firm budgets in the Welsh Government and we’ve never not managed to do a deal, so I don’t see why this year should be the first one.
I’ve said to all political parties, even to the Tories, if they want to talk between draft and final and helping to improve the budget and see where we can do more for things we would all like to do more in and then allow the budget to pass for all the benefits it would bring in the health service, in local government, in schools, then of course, I’m interested in that conversation.
I’m keen to have that conversation. I believe it will be hard work and take a lot of talking. I’m confident the budget will pass.