4. Will the Cabinet Secretary provide an update on the Welsh Government’s funding for social care? OAQ(5)0141(HWS)

We’ve continued to protect social care with significant funding. An additional £55 million has been made available for social care in 2017-18, and this includes the £20 million for social care announced earlier this week. We have also provided £60 million for the integrated care fund.

Thank you, Minister. I am happy to acknowledge the additional moneys that you’ve committed to social care. Even so, by my calculation, I don’t think the full Barnett consequential of the Chancellor’s £2 billion for social care has found its way into your budget, but I’ll leave that for another day. Because, despite those considerable additional funds made available for social care in Wales, local authorities in my region have cut next year’s social care budget by £2.2 million, raised it by just 0.3 per cent, or have predicted an underspend on last year by nearly £0.5 million. If you’ve found extra money for social care because social care needed that money, how are you making sure that local authorities are spending it on social care? I’m sure you can give me a far more informed answer than the default answer that I got from the First Minister yesterday. I think we all have far more confidence in you than in Jeremy Corbyn. Thank you.

Well, the majority of funding, as you’ll know, provided by the Welsh Government to local authorities is unhypothecated through the revenue support grant, so that does give local authorities the freedom to spend this funding according to their own priorities and their own needs that they’ve found. But, it’s important to recognise that specific grants do have a role to play in ensuring that new priorities are resourced and given sufficient importance in delivery terms. So, I’d refer you particularly to the additional £10 million funding that we’re providing to local authorities to meet the challenges of the national living wage. This will be allocated to local authorities using the standard spending assessment formula, but half of that grant will be made available upon commitment of local authorities to the terms, grants and conditions, and then the second payment will be contingent on our confidence that the grant is delivering its objectives. So, meeting the pressures that the national living wage put on the sector is extremely important in terms of giving us a workforce that is sustainable and that is well paid, well remunerated and respected and that eventually will lead to a career that people want to come into, where they see career progression. Obviously, the work that Social Care Wales will be taking forward from Monday as of next week will be important in that, as will the registration of domiciliary care workers from 2020.