Well (1) that's untrue, and I was talking about year-on-year changes.

Business rates were centralised and collected locally and then redistributed with the rate support grant as part of aggregate external finance. Now, how does the money go out? Blaenau Gwent gets £1,587 and Monmouth gets £995. Is that fair? Well, Blaenau Gwent has 8.8 per cent of its properties in band D; Monmouthshire has 65.8 per cent of its properties in band D. So, a 1 per cent increase in council tax in Blaenau Gwent and a 1 per cent increase in council tax in Monmouthshire makes a huge difference. The average is £1,344 per capita. For half the councils that would be more; for half, it would be less. 

I'm going to read out the councils in order, to get this on the record. First is Blaenau Gwent, second is Merthyr, third is RCT, fourth is Neath Port Talbot, fifth is Denbighshire, sixth is Caerphilly, seventh Torfaen, eighth Newport, ninth Gwynedd, tenth Carmarthenshire, eleventh Ynys Môn, twelfth's Bridgend, thirteenth Ceredigion, fourteenth Powys, fifteenth Conwy, sixteenth Pembrokeshire, seventeenth Swansea, eighteenth Wrexham, nineteenth Flintshire, twentieth Cardiff, twenty-first the Vale of Glamorgan and twenty-second Monmouth.

We regularly hear calls for the formula allocating money to be changed. Representing Swansea, in seventeenth place, I could say how it would benefit us, but, give everyone a standard amount, the top 12, in terms of how much they get, would end up getting less, and the bottom 11 would get more, unless there's an increased amount of money there. I was a member of the distribution sub-group many years ago, when it made a minor change to the highways formula. It was 52 per cent population, 48 per cent road length; it went to 50 per cent for each. What happened was there were winners and losers. Powys and Gwynedd won, Cardiff and Newport lost. 

For everyone who says we should have greater regard for sparsity and rurality, there is someone saying we need to take greater account of poverty and deprivation. Councils such as Pembrokeshire will say, with some justification, their population increases massively during the  summer months, and thus their costs. Councils such as Cardiff will say they have major events and a daily influx of people, and that increases their costs. All say they need additional funding. 

And I think, really, you could change the formula—. Everybody thinks: you change the formula and everybody's going to win. That's financially impossible and numerically illiterate. If you've got the same amount of money to be distributed around 22 councils, every time you get a winner you get a loser. Local government has had an increase since the initial funding was announced. Wales should have an additional £800 million, based upon 2008 expenditure, according to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, a figure no-one has yet disagreed with. We are being short-changed by Westminster. There are those saying—[Interruption.] There are those saying—