Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Constitution and Cabinet Office – in the Senedd at 1:30 pm on 17 April 2024.
Luke Fletcher
Plaid Cymru
1:30,
17 April 2024
We of course see the consequences of inadequate funding and misalignment with the needs of people in some of its harshest terms here in Wales. The case for scrapping the Barnett formula in favour of a needs-based system is overwhelming and bolstered by the fact that there is cross-party consensus around the need to seriously examine the funding landscape. Now, even though everyone here is sympathetic to the argument, it seems that the Welsh Government hasn’t been particularly influential when it comes to getting a Conservative UK Government to change the policy. Why does the Cabinet Secretary think this is the case? And with a General Election on the horizon, what guarantees are there that a Labour Government would deliver on fair funding?
The cabinet is the group of twenty or so (and no more than 22) senior government ministers who are responsible for running the departments of state and deciding government policy.
It is chaired by the prime minister.
The cabinet is bound by collective responsibility, which means that all its members must abide by and defend the decisions it takes, despite any private doubts that they might have.
Cabinet ministers are appointed by the prime minister and chosen from MPs or peers of the governing party.
However, during periods of national emergency, or when no single party gains a large enough majority to govern alone, coalition governments have been formed with cabinets containing members from more than one political party.
War cabinets have sometimes been formed with a much smaller membership than the full cabinet.
From time to time the prime minister will reorganise the cabinet in order to bring in new members, or to move existing members around. This reorganisation is known as a cabinet re-shuffle.
The cabinet normally meets once a week in the cabinet room at Downing Street.
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.
In a general election, each constituency chooses an MP to represent it by process of election. The party who wins the most seats in parliament is in power, with its leader becoming Prime Minister and its Ministers/Shadow Ministers making up the new Cabinet. If no party has a majority, this is known as a hung Parliament. The next general election will take place on or before 3rd June 2010.
