Local Government Preparations for Brexit

Part of 2. Questions to the Counsel General and Brexit Minister (in respect of his Brexit Minister responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 2:56 pm on 20 March 2019.

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Photo of Jeremy Miles Jeremy Miles Labour 2:56, 20 March 2019

Well, that's a very good question. Of course, the Wales Audit Office indicated that the work that they had done at the back end of last year indicated a degree of variability between local authorities. I must say, I'm not sure that that is the picture now, so I'm concerned to hear that one response that the Member referred to there.

There are a number of challenges here. We have funded, through the EU transition fund made available to the Welsh Local Government Association funding—modest amounts, in all truth—to provide a kind of sharing of best practice and to develop a toolkit so that individual authorities are able to assess for themselves what their readiness is, and that's public domain information in relation to the dashboards that they've put together.

In relation to the individual resources of authorities, the Minister for local government announced last week further funding to all local authorities in Wales to increase their capacity for preparedness for Brexit preparations in general. It's ultimately a question for local authorities to satisfy themselves, of course, but, mindful of what the Wales Audit Office indicated in that report, one of the steps the Government is taking in response to that is to support activities between WLGA and the academy to build capacity for scrutiny of the political decisions being taken in local authorities across Wales. His question was about operations, but it was also about political leadership and political scrutiny. There have been, or there are about to be, roadshow events for authorities in Swansea and in two other locations—I'll remind myself of where the two other locations are—and they are under way at the moment. So, we hope very much that that will raise the capacity of those undertaking scrutiny of political decisions in local government around these decisions.