HS2: Senedd Tory leader wants share of cash for Wales
Wales should get its "fair share" of cash from building the HS2 high speed rail project in England, the Tory Senedd leader will tell party members.
It is the first time Andrew RT Davies has directly called on the UK Conservative government to give Wales extra funding because of the scheme.
It comes after Mr Davies said he wanted to do more to develop a distinctive Welsh brand for the Conservatives.
His speech to the Welsh Conservative conference will also focus on housing.
He will criticise Welsh ministers' for "building barely half the number of houses" needed.
Speaking in the opening session of the two-day event in Newtown, Powys, later, Mr Davies will propose a change in planning rules that would force builders to complete, rather than just begin, work on land for which they have planning permission.
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"It's incumbent on us not to sit idly by and watch as the chance of home ownership disappears before the eyes of younger people here in Wales," he will say.
Mr Davies, who leads the Conservative opposition in the Senedd, will attack Labour and Plaid Cymru moves to increase council tax on second homes which his party calls "an assault on property rights that will do little to tackle the underlying problems".
The conference is taking place after a poor performance for the party in the recent Welsh local elections, where it lost more than 80 seats and control of its only council.
It was in the aftermath of those results that Mr Davies talked about the need for the party to develop a distinctive Welsh voice.
His comments on HS2, a multi-billion pound scheme to create high-speed rail links between London and major cities in the Midlands and north of England, refer to the fact that Wales is not getting extra funding as a consequence of the building taking place in England.
That is despite the fact Scotland and Northern Ireland will both receive proportional additional payments.
This is because the UK government has classified HS2 as an England and Wales project, despite calls from a committee of Welsh MPs for the project to reclassified as England only, which would enable Wales to get that extra money.
The Welsh Affairs Committee said the UK government's own analysis concluded the rail project would produce "an economic dis-benefit to Wales".
However, Mr Davies will praise the UK Conservative government for "raising the national living wage" during the cost of living crisis as well as "increasing the National Insurance threshold and introducing tapered relief for Universal Credit".
He will also repeat his calls for St David's Day to be made a bank holiday in Wales.
Andrew RT Davies has previously criticised the cost of HS2 but his call for the UK government to give Wales proportional funding is particularly interesting in light of his analysis of the party's poor local election results.
He said that the party had been affected by UK issues like Partygate and cost of living and needed to do more to emphasise its Welsh brand.
So are the HS2 comments significant as part of a process to develop "clear blue water" between the Welsh and UK party, or does Mr Davies simply regard them as a logical progression of his previous concerns on this single issue?
Whatever the answer to that specific question, the Welsh party is facing others around how distinctive it wants its Welsh voice to be and to what extent it can or should try to insulate itself from the wider UK political weather.
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