Health given a welcome boost as voters send Labour clear message

AFTER Jane Hutt’s latest Budget no-one should be under any illusion about the ability of voters to influence spending priorities.

The general election sent a clear message to Welsh Labour: the state of the NHS in Wales is causing the party damage.

Two seats – Vale of Clwyd and Gower – were almost certainly lost as a direct consequence of perceived failures in the NHS.

She wants to avoid a future recurrence. In what could be her last hurrah Ms Hutt has, therefore, raided other budgets to give the NHS a muchneeded fillip.

Whether it will be enough to save her own Vale of Glamorgan seat in next May’s Assembly election – and several others elsewhere – remains to be seen.

The increase in health funding is at the expense of every other department, although that wasn’t what the Minister wanted to dwell on. There’s no way of avoiding that when the UK Government is intent on continuing its austerity programme for the next few years.

One of the biggest losers is higher education, forcing universities to rely even more than before on student tuition fees topped up by the Welsh Government.

Former Education Minister Leighton Andrews used to rail against universities for spending more on administration than education. Perhaps his more mild-mannered successor Huw Lewis will now pursue the theme more gently.

Carwyn Jones’ six-yearold pledge to maintain schools funding at 1% higher than his government’s Treasury block grant has been maintained – as it had to be. Anything short of that would have been seen as a huge climbdown in advance of May’s election. Yet the 1% premium is unlikely to be enough to stave off redundancies for teachers.

Local government cuts may not have been quite as bad as expected but they are still likely to lead to more leisure centre and library closures and more job losses.

The sector’s leaders will issue further apocalyptic warnings about the end of local services as we have known them.

Then after the Assembly election they will do their best to kill off further talk about council mergers, saying the implementation costs will be unaffordable,

When the amount of cash available goes down cutting is the only option.

But surely we should all worry about the future of Wales when the “innovation” budget is reduced.