Mark Drakeford has said the upcoming budget for Wales will mean a “major change of direction for Wales”. Explaining the decisions he and his cabinet colleagues had made in deciding how to divide the £26bn budget between all their departments, Mr Drakeford said they will help struggling health or council services “turn a corner”.
Speaking on the BBC Radio Wales breakfast show, Mr Drakeford said: “There will be thousands and thousands of patients in Wales treated and treated more quickly. It will allow a 40% increase in the capital budget, to purchase new equipment, to make sure the premises are as we need them to be, to begin to deal with the backlog of capital maintenance that is built up over those 14 Tory years.
“This is a major change of direction. We’ve had years and years of cuts after cuts. Now we are able to reinvest, but it is the first step on that journey to the brighter future. It doesn’t fill every hole, it doesn’t solve every problem but by goodness, it’s a very, very different proposition than the one we were grappling with this time last year.”
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The health budget is more than £600m, but there will be a huge 40% rise in capital funding for health with £435m for day-to-day, front line spending. Asked if most of that will go on NHS staff wages, he said yes.
He was asked if the government could reduce waiting time targets before the Senedd election in 2026. “There are two sides to the equation in the health service. There is the supply side…the people who work in it, the money we put into it. But there is the demand side as well. And the truth of the health service in Wales is that more and more and more people come through the door every week and every month. One point five appointments happen every month in Wales in our GP surgeries for a population of three million people.”
He was asked if this funding was “transformational”. “It turns the corner. It makes a start. It doesn’t mean the problem is solved and has gone away. I think they will be, as I say, thousands and thousands more people will get treatment next year. We will see that corner being turned but the journey ahead isn’t going to be one that’s just completed in 12 months.”
Mr Drakeford was asked about social care and whether the money being put into social care would be the change that was needed.
“It’s very important to see this year’s budget and next year’s budget together, because we’ve had a considerable uplift in resources in the current financial year. On Friday of last week, Jeremy Miles, the health minister, announced another £10m for social care to help it get through the winter, and particularly to bolster those services, but allow people to return to their own homes rather than being stuck in hospital.”
Mr Drakeford faced questions in the Senedd on Tuesday (December 10) where he was told despite the rise in funding for councils compared to the previous year, there would still be a shortfall that would need to be met by higher council tax bills.
It was put to Mr Drakeford the uplift would equate to a £235 million increase in their budgets but the prediction has been for a budget shortfall of around about £560 million.
“This budget allows local authorities to take a step back from the brink,” he said, but said it would not solve all their problems. “We start with the two biggest building blocks in our budget, the health service and local government, and we do a very best to squeeze as much as we can out of our budgets, because those are the front line services that people depend on. I think when our local authority colleagues see the detail of what we’ve got today to be further discussions with them between the draft and the final, but I think this will go quite a way to helping them to manage better with the pressures they face next.”
Mr Drakeford said his budget was “silent” about the impact extra national Insurance contributions for employers would have because “at this point, I don’t know how much money will come to Wales, and I won’t know until May or June of next year.”
“That’s the timetable that the Treasury is working to. What I said to local authority leaders when I met them earlier this week, and I say to other public sector employers in Wales, when the money comes from the Treasury, the Welsh Government will simply be a postbox.
He said the delay with information was a Treasury issue, not a Welsh Government one. “I’m afraid that isn’t a question for me because I’m not in charge of any of that. What I can do is guarantee those public service employers in Wales that every penny that comes from the Treasury to the Welsh Government will go straight to the door and to them to meet those costs.”