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Comprehensive Spending Review

Everybody has got that YouTube moment on their iPods. Much as I respect Plaid and its views, sometimes it does not get its policies and its ducks in a row. Devolution has meant that we pass the money to the Welsh Assembly Government and they make their own choices. In England, the coalition Government have decided that total spending on the NHS will increase in real terms in each year of this Parliament. The Welsh Assembly Government, however, have chosen to freeze NHS spending in cash terms, which means a real-terms decline of 7.6%. Because of those decisions taken by the Labour and Plaid Cymru Assembly Government, Wales is now the only part of the United Kingdom where health spending will not be protected. The Government have undertaken to increase the schools budget every year of the spending review in real terms, but that is not the decision of the Welsh Assembly Government. In Wales, education will be cut by 7% in real terms over the next three years. Those are, of course, devolved matters for the Welsh Assembly Government to decide. I hope, however, that the Welsh Assembly Government’s decisions on where to allocate funding will not see standards of health care and education fall behind in Wales. I am sure that we all share that ambition.