, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Yes.
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Yes. So, on the reconciliation of the figure, the final figure for the allocation is £830 million. I think, when we submitted the evidence paper, that was still a moving figure. So, it’s just a question of timing. That is now a final figure of £830 million as…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Oes, ond dŷn nhw ddim yn rhai validated eto. Ond mae'n dangos, ar y cyfan, fod y ffigurau wedi haneru. Gallwn ni ysgrifennu at y pwyllgor gyda’r wybodaeth y gallwn ni ei rhannu ar hyn o bryd, ond, wrth gwrs, caiff e ei—beth bynnag yw’r gair—'validate-o' maes…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
There are two lines of funding on this, some is a health board level fund and some is a national level fund. So, the national funding, we've increased the central emergency budget, for example, quite significantly, and we have provision in the budget to deal…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Well, the budget for that is delegated to health boards. So, the budget itself doesn't illustrate that, but the planning process that goes with it is designed to identify that and make sure that we've tested it with health boards. So, when the boards put…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
It isn't directly related to the building itself. The experience people have of the hospital in general is a positive one. There are questions in terms of staffing levels and in terms of the layout of that specific department. So, the health board has…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Certainly. So, as the committee will know, each health board is in some level of escalation. Betsi Cadwaladr is at level 5, which is the highest level, and that's across the organisation. Hywel Dda is at level 4 across the organisation. In Swansea bay…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Have they? That's good.
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Yes, we do both. So, again, one of the mandatory requirements of this year's planning guidance is to implement the agency staffing frameworks that we have. So, we published last year an agency workforce reduction programme and a framework to control that…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Yes, so I think the correlation between budget and the availability of places isn't a perfect correlation year on year, because there is quite a lot of scope for juggling the mix of provision that you commission within that envelope, and so I would not say…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Certainly. So, the UK Government, as you will know, has provided its remit to the pay review bodies and they are saying that they're expecting a pay bill increase, if I can put it in those terms, of 2.8 per cent. That's the figure that they have set. They…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Yes, certainly. I had a very productive discussion, actually, yesterday with the six goals team to have a clear sense of where we are with the programme, and I think that there is very good progress. The budget for next year is around £28 million. About £18…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Please do.
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
I'm not sure I understood the question exactly. What are they saying is the issue?
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
The advice is on its way, I assume, from what we've just heard.
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Does anybody have the—? Do you have the information, Alex?
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
The programme is a very important one. It's important that we do put in place a digital programme that enables that shift to continue from hospitals into primary care. That's been very successful in terms of eye disease, but you're right to say that ensuring…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
There are very interesting historical reasons—I don't think that the Chair would be happy for us to discuss these matters for very long—for why Estonia are so advanced. They started from the beginning in the 1990s without those legacy questions, so the…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
The budget that is available isn't sufficient to meet all of the challenges that we have in our estate. The estate in Wales is a relatively old estate. If you look at the past 30 years, I think around 40 per cent of the estate has been constructed in that…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
The capital budget has increased from £440 million to £615 million—that's the scale, if you like—and elements of that are related to changes in terms of accounting. So, there's an element of that. What I would say on the backlog and the kinds of figures that…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
Obviously, it's the last thing I want to see. Clearly, I do not want people to be feeling they have to make that choice. None of us would want that, obviously. In terms of the context for what you just said, which is why I was checking for the figures here…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
I can tell you what they are for this year; we won't have broken that down for next year, because the plans for next year would be based on the performance in this year, so that isn't a piece of work that could have been done yet. But in this year, the run…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
The way our system is structured is that, obviously, we set the strategy and funding and then the operational aspects are delivered locally, for reasons that we all absolutely understand, obviously. But there are circumstances in which Ministers have powers…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
There are two aspects to that. So, take, for example, the funding that you just asked me about, the £50 million fund. We were crystal clear at the start of that process—frankly, because the plans we were funding were health board-backed plans—so we said that…
, Health and Social Care Committee
Welsh Government draft budget 2025-26
No, that really isn't the plan. Basically, the test was: where are the waits that are longer than two years? So, the plans that have been presented to us and which we are funding are across a much, much wider range of specialisms than the two or three that…
