Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:40 pm on 23 January 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:40, 23 January 2019

I'm afraid I don't know the date on which they're planning to come down. If it's possible for me to meet them, I certainly will. However, I've just come from the finance sub-group of the partnership council for Wales this morning where the leader of Flintshire council was a participant. I think we had a very amicable and useful conversation there about the way that the formula works.

I specifically asked if there were any areas of the formula that people wanted to revisit. We're very open to revisiting the formula, as long as it produces the kinds of results that all of local government want to see, which is a fair and equitable distribution mechanism, which irons out some of the winners and losers, and, as you know, we fully fund the funding floor on the basis of that. That meeting went very well and there were no dissenting voices to that. The distribution sub-group that works on the formula will be meeting. Today's meeting was able to sign-off the work programme for the distribution sub-group. So, I don't really recognise the picture that the Member paints there.

There's obviously a completely different and perhaps misunderstanding issue around the size of the pot in the first place on which the distribution formula takes effect. And the size of the pot in the first place is, of course, driven by the austerity measures of the Conservative Government in the UK. So, we are only able to distribute the funds that we have available to us, and so I don't think that I'm going to be taking any lessons from the Member opposite about how to deal with the fund overall. But if he's talking about the distribution mechanism, then Aaron Shotton was one of the members of the group. The group was amicable, the Deputy Minister and I attended it, and we had a very useful meeting with local government. I was very grateful to them for the friendliness of their approach and no issues were raised with me of that sort.