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Comprehensive Spending Review

By holding this second Welsh Grand Committee meeting, I have already doubled the record of previous Governments, which held only one meeting in 2005 and only one in 2007. I will not take lectures from the right hon. Gentleman about courtesy, after the way in which the Committee has behaved, both last time and today. Having had the advantage of directly questioning a Treasury Minister, I intend to keep my remarks brief to allow maximum time for Members to participate in the debate. At the last count, there were some 23 Members, and if my mathematics are correct we have about 200 minutes, so the shorter I keep my remarks the more opportunities right hon. and hon. Members will have to make their points, in which we, as a Government, are interested. As we have just heard, the spending review sets out how the coalition Government intend to carry out Britain’s unavoidable deficit reduction plan. The spending review settlement for the Welsh Assembly Government was determined by the Barnett formula in the usual way, in exactly the same way as under the previous Government, using the formula that the right hon. Member for Neath said had ““served Wales well””—just to remind him. However, because of the decisions that we took to protect spending on health and schools in England, Wales’s overall spending will be reduced by much less than the average for non-protected Departments. That represents a 7.5% reduction in the Welsh Assembly Government resource budget, which is an average annual cut of less then 2%, and less than the 3% year-on-year revenue reductions that the Welsh Assembly Government had previously said they were planning for.