Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:58 pm on 27 June 2023.
Mark Drakeford
Labour
1:58,
27 June 2023
I think it is a significant misrepresentation to conflate the positions of a Prime Minister in office, making decisions today to deny Wales the funding that Wales ought to have through the Barnett formula as a result of HS2 investment, and a government that hasn't even been elected yet. Sir Keir Starmer will be weighing up the options that an incoming Labour government will have in front of it when it inherits the economic catastrophe that has been the record of the Conservative Government. He's not going to be offering a long shopping list of all the things that he will or will not do on the day that he comes into office, and nobody should mistake that for a positive decision not to do something. All he is saying is that, at this point, with a year to go to an election, he will be having to, in a responsible way, make decisions in the context in which he will find himself. The view of the Welsh Labour Government and the view of the Senedd has been very plain, and it's not just our view, as we know, it's the view of many independent commentators far beyond this Chamber: HS2 is not a scheme that benefits Wales. There ought to have been a Barnett consequential, in the way there has been for Scotland. Keir Starmer is in no doubt at all about our position on that issue, and I will make sure that we continue to articulate it to him.
Ministers make up the Government and almost all are members of the House of Lords or the House of Commons. There are three main types of Minister. Departmental Ministers are in charge of Government Departments. The Government is divided into different Departments which have responsibilities for different areas. For example the Treasury is in charge of Government spending. Departmental Ministers in the Cabinet are generally called 'Secretary of State' but some have special titles such as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ministers of State and Junior Ministers assist the ministers in charge of the department. They normally have responsibility for a particular area within the department and are sometimes given a title that reflects this - for example Minister of Transport.
An economic mechanism used by the Treasury to adjust automatically the amounts of public expenditure allocated to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, to reflect changes in spending levels allocated to public services in England, England and Wales or Great Britain as a whole.