Christina Rees
Main Page: Christina Rees (Labour (Co-op) - Neath)Department Debates - View all Christina Rees's debates with the Wales Office
Barnett Floor (Wales)
Christina Rees Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered a Barnett floor for Wales.
It is a privilege to have secured my first Westminster Hall debate, which is on an important topic affecting funding for Wales in general and my constituents in particular. We all know how difficult the funding settlements have been in recent years. The Welsh Government have faced great funding challenges, and local councils, including my own Torfaen County Borough Council, are struggling to make ends meet and doing their best to protect front-line services when less and less money is coming from Westminster.
Christina Rees (Neath) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the losses that local authorities have experienced and will continue to experience. In 2014-15, Neath Port Talbot’s budget was cut by £17 million. It has been predicted that, from April 2016, Neath Port Talbot will lose £18 million or possibly more, depending on the autumn statement. Public services have already been cut severely—
Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)
Order. Please make an intervention not a speech.
Christina Rees
I am simply making the point that we should not suffer from the Barnett formula.
Nick Thomas-Symonds
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. The Neath Port Talbot example further illustrates and reinforces the point that I made about Torfaen.
The debate deals with an aspect of Westminster funding, the so-called Barnett floor. As Members are aware, Joel—later Lord—Barnett introduced the Barnett formula in 1978, when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in the context of the devolution debate of that era. He did not originally intend that it should become a permanent feature, yet here, some 37 years later, it still governs the Wales-Westminster fiscal relationship.
More recently, in 2009, the interim report of the Holtham commission, “Funding devolved government in Wales: Barnett and beyond”, was published. It suggested that Wales was underfunded.