Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip – in the Senedd at 2:32 pm on 20 June 2018.
Apologies. You did indeed raise it yesterday. I think there were a series of questions and I neglected to answer it, so apologies for that, Siân Gwenllian. We haven't abolished the grant. It was subsumed into the overall grant, but I take your point. There is a real tension, if you like, between hypothecated and unhypothecated funding across local government, given the austerity agenda still being visited upon us by the UK Government. What we're looking to do is give local authorities flexibility in their funding so that we don't have rigid lines about what they know locally they need to fund. But at the same time, we do need to make sure that our priorities are being met, and so we're looking at a protocol of working with them, which we're reviewing this autumn, and I will undertake very much—in fact, I'm having constant conversations with my colleagues across Government, not just the Cabinet Secretary for Education, because there are a number of grants caught up in this—to make sure that we target the same people, but that the local authority has the flexibility to make sure that the service locally benefits that. And, of course, we have given additional money specifically to cover off some of the issues that the MEAG grant conversation with local government raised.
I share her concerns. We're very keen to hit the right balance between hypothecation, which sometimes has unintended consequences, flexibility, and making sure that the money reaches the communities that it was intended to benefit.