2. Will the First Minister make a statement on the financial situation at Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board? OQ59880

Llywydd, thank you. After more than a decade of austerity, the impact of rampant inflation has reduced the value of the budget available to Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, as with all other public bodies in Wales. In this financial year, the board predicts a gap of £134 million between the available resources and anticipated expenditure.

You are entirely right, of course—the pressures are huge. At the NHS Confederation dinner yesterday evening, your Minister for health said, in the context of cuts:

'You ain't seen nothing yet.'

Those are the words that she used, with the strong suggestion that there would be need for cuts this year—that is, in-year cuts—in the current budget. So, can you confirm whether the Government will ask health boards—and Betsi Cadwaladr health board, of course, being one of them—to find cuts in their budgets this year? And bearing in mind, as you said in your earlier response, that most of them won't balance their books in any case, what impact would that have on their budgets, but also on the services that they are able to provide?

Llywydd, the Welsh Government is not making any requests of the health boards to cut down on the budgets that were made available to them by this Senedd in our vote on the final budget. We are having to ask boards to reduce the level of over-expenditure that they have been predicting this year. So, it's not a matter of us asking them to spend less than we've given them; it's asking them not to spend even more than we have given them. And the reason that all health boards in Wales, for the very first time, are predicting overspends is because of the cumulative impacts of budgets held back by the UK Government, year after year, for more than a decade, and, now, the impact of that made even more significant by the effects of rampant inflation, the effects of energy cost prices on the budgets of our health boards. The effort that the health Minister is making with ministerial colleagues is to mitigate those impacts in the health service. Those efforts that we are making need to be matched by efforts the health boards themselves make, and I have every confidence that they will be doing just that.

First Minister, this is a health board that has had its finances under the spotlight for a number of years now, including under the spotlight of Welsh Government officials. Yet, we learnt that, just a few weeks ago, it was found by Audit Wales that there was a nursing director—the executive nursing director—who was being paid more than three times the permitted financial compensation for her role, at a rate of £469,500 per year, between 1 April and 31 July 2022. Clearly, that is unacceptable. It's outside of the Welsh Government's own rules. What are you doing to make sure that Betsi Cadwaladr health board, and, indeed, every other health board in Wales, plays by the rules that you set, because you're clearly not policing them well enough?

I agree with Darren Millar that it is completely unacceptable that the previous board should have overseen the overpayment to one of its executive members on the scale that Darren Millar just outlined, breaching not only the board's own instructions, but the instructions of the Welsh Government. What we have done is to replace the board with a new chief executive and a new chair, who are now having to investigate how that mistake was made and to put it right. There was nothing wrong with the framework, there was nothing wrong with the rules that were in place. What was beyond what is acceptable is the oversight of those rules at the board. Many Members on the benches opposite have defended the previous board, have questioned the Welsh Government's actions in bringing new people in to oversee it. This is a very good example of why that was necessary.