Elfyn Llwyd was interviewed by Andrew Neil on Straight Talk last week. As it is no longer available on iPlayer I've taken the liberty of posting it here:
There's one small thing that he got wrong. Crossrail in London is a £16bn project which is being paid for partly by money from Central Government, partly by London businesses and partly by borrowing against anticipated fare income. Although it wasn't obvious at the time of the first announcement (in fact when I talked about Crossrail on the WalesOnline forum I said the same as Elfyn has just said) after a little arm-twisting it was agreed that the portion of the cost funded by Central Government, some £5.5bn, will attract a Barnett incremental for Scotland, as mentioned here:
Scotland given £500m sop for Crossrail - Evening Standard, 29 October 2007
And confirmed more officially here:
Select Committee on the Barnett Formula - §44
That means that we in Wales will receive our proportionate share too, about £320m.
Of course, as the Select Committee report confirms, many other projects such as the Olympics are classed as UK-wide money and so won't attract any Barnett consequential. The decision is made by the Treasury and is actually quite arbitrary, rather than based on any consistent rules. So Elfyn's general point is quite valid ...
... and everything else was top notch.
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