Wel, diolch yn fawr, Lywydd.

Can I begin by thanking Simon Thomas for what he said on behalf of the Finance Committee? I look forward to replying to the recommendations that the Finance Committee has made in detail. I’ll do my best to be as constructive as possible and as informative as possible in doing so. I could, though, associate myself for a moment with the point made by the Delphic Nick Ramsay, when he said that drawing general conclusions from a supplementary budget may not be the most sensible course of action. And in the speeches we’ve heard this afternoon there are some valiant attempts to create very large super structures on the narrow foundations of what is, after all, a technical standard part of the financial management process. I’ve agreed previously with the Finance Committee about the fact that more has to be done to draw on the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 in the way that we shape these things. I came to the Finance Committee with what I thought was a very genuine attempt to try and illustrate some of the ways in which the decisions made in the supplementary budget reflect the advice of that Act. But a supplementary budget is never going to be the complete answer to an Act of that sort, and I look forward to doing more on it in the future.

As far as invest-to-save is concerned, the invest-to-save scheme already publishes every year an annual report into its work, and my predecessor, Jane Hutt, provided the last Finance Committee with exactly what Mike Hedges asked for in terms of an income and expenditure layout, and if it’s helpful, I’m happy to update that for the current Finance Committee.

Can I just attempt to answer some of the points raised by Mark Reckless, particularly in relation to the education MEG? As far as revenue is concerned, this supplementary budget contains three main additions to the education resources: £3.5 million to contribute towards student finance pressures, and that is because we have cohort protection for students in the current system as we move to Diamond; £4.47 million as a down payment on this Government’s commitment to £100 million to raise school standards over this Assembly term; and then £20 million for the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales for the four purposes that I set out in front of the Finance Committee when I was before it.