Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:54 pm on 5 July 2017.
Well, Llywydd, the single greatest contribution to the rise in that £11 million figure is the figure from Conwy County Borough Council, and the Member, of course, raised that with me in the Chamber last month. To another extent, there are some classification issues that lie behind the figure—just things being classified in a different way.
I’ve not met a single local authority leader, Llywydd, who doesn’t tell me how anxious they are to try and minimise the amount of money that they spend on those functions in order to free up money for the front line. The truth of the matter is, as I’ve said here in the past, and I repeated to local authority treasurers again last week, they face even tougher times ahead. The budget available to this Government goes down next year, the year after, and the year after that again, and there is no escaping the fact that those reductions will have an impact on our ability to fund our partners to do all the things that they would like to do, too. So, the incentive and the impetus for local authorities to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out of backroom services, sharing administrative arrangements, being more efficient in the way they produce support services is very well understood in local government, and the reforms that we will bring forward will assist them in doing so.