Budget bits

I won’t even attempt to give you a comprehensive round-up of the Welsh Assembly Government’s Draft Budget: you can get that from Gareth Hughes here. Instead here are a few random notes and snippets from an intense day.

* The fact that the Higher Education budget has been cut by nearly £37bn is surely a sign that higher tuition fees are now inevitable. If so, what sort of level will they be set at? Rumour has it that the plan was to set Welsh tuition fees at somewhere between the current £3k and England’s £9k, maybe at around £5k. Is that still likely or possible?

* Ministers already have a pretty good idea which individual programmes they’ll be cutting; we’ll all know by Christmas.

* Was the reason that Wales hasn’t followed Scotland’s idea of a pay freeze for higher earners in the public sector because all the pay settlements that the Assembly Government can influence have already been agreed meaning a new pay freeze would have affected practically nobody?

* RIP SCIF. I may be the only one who cares about this: the Assembly Government’s SCIF programme is dead and buried. SCIF was a pot of £400m of capital funding available to ‘innovative, cross-cutting and strategic capital projects.’ Amongst these projects were schools in Wrexham, Newport and Blaenavon; a scheme to build 400 affordable homes across Wales; another to transform the Heads of the Valleys into a low carbon region; a pan-Wales network of anaerobic digestors; rail investment, part of the Heads of the Valleys dualling scheme;  flood and coastal defences. Finance minister Jane Hutt said all the projects which had won SCIF funding would continue to be invested in. But the move which would have delivered “a step change in the Assembly Government’s approach to planning and delivering capital investment strategically” is over.

 

 

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