Our motion notes that Welsh council tax payers currently pay a higher proportion of their income on council tax than in England or Scotland. It also regrets that the level of council tax in Wales has trebled since the formation of the National Assembly for Wales in 1999, and that the level of council tax in Wales has risen at a faster rate than in England and Scotland.

In 1998, the average Welsh Band D council tax payer had to pay £495. This has risen to £1,591 in 2019. In other words, council tax in Wales has risen by an astonishing 221 per cent since the UK Labour Government took control of Wales in 1997, a far greater leap than that of England, up 153 per cent, and Scotland, up 57 per cent. And whilst both the UK Conservative Government and the Scottish Government enabled council tax to be frozen in the years up to 2017, the Welsh Labour Government spent elsewhere the £94 million in consequentials it received to help hard-pressed council tax payers.

The Welsh Government defends this by stating that average band D council tax levels in Wales are still lower than in England, whilst dodging the reality that council tax payers in Wales spend the largest proportion of their wages on council tax in Britain, that they have faced the biggest increases, and that this is a false comparison because it starts from a historic baseline when average band D council tax levels in Wales were, by definition, significantly below those in England.

Welsh Labour Government Ministers have long compared funding between England and Wales, claiming that councils there are worse off. However, as local government funding policy has diverged significantly since devolution, including direct funding for schools and business rates retention in England, it is completely impossible to make this comparison. Their default position is always to blame everything on the UK Government and to conveniently forget that the funding floor agreed by the UK Conservative Government means that the Welsh Government now benefits from the certainty that the funding it receives for devolved services won’t fall below 115 per cent of the figure per head in England. Currently, for every £1 per head spent by the UK Conservative Government in England on matters devolved to Wales, £1.20 is given to Wales. Meanwhile, the Welsh Labour Government has continually made bad deals with, for example, Kancoat and the Circuit of Wales, costing Welsh taxpayers millions. It is the Welsh Government who should be answering for their disgraceful funding decisions.

Interestingly, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition—Jeremy Corbyn’s own cheerleaders-in-chief—also stated last October that 

'no Labour-led council has insufficient reserves that it could not use to generate the resources for a no cuts budget for 2019-20.'

I'm simply quoting; if you question that, perhaps you may wish to speak to your colleagues or comrades.

Local authorities are sitting on £800 million in useable reserves, and their elected representatives need to be held accountable in saying how that is spent. The issue is not that they have sufficient resources to cover big projects, but that some councils are increasing their levels of reserves while expecting council tax payers to cover inflation-busting council tax rises.

As I have detailed, south Wales Labour-run councils are the real winners of the final local government settlement. Anglesey county council’s finance chief warned that if the council didn't put more cash into reserves, the authority could go the same way as Northamptonshire, which was unable to balance its books and became effectively insolvent last year.

Another of the biggest losers, Labour-led Flintshire County Council, has imposed an 8.1 per cent council tax increase, taking the total increase, including police, fire and rescue authority and community council precepts, to 8.75 per cent. They launched a campaign last November, #BackTheAsk, which highlighted cross-party frustration about the funding they receive from the Welsh Labour Government. The campaign specifically asked for a fair share of funds from Welsh Government, highlighting that Flintshire is one of the lowest funded councils per head of population. This had been unanimously agreed by all parties on the council.

In December, before the final budget was passed, and after the announcement of extra funding from the Welsh Government, Flintshire estimated that it still faced a £3.2 million funding gap, stating that it is unreasonable for councils to be put in this position, and a cross-party group of Flintshire councillors subsequently travelled here to lobby for fairer funding last month. Even in Flintshire, however, opposition members had moved an alternative budget using additional contingency reserves to keep council tax increases to 5.5 per cent, arguing that the Labour leadership had taken the political decision to make a point about local authority underfunding.

Given everything I've detailed, our motion calls on the Welsh Government to commission an independent review of the Welsh local government funding formula. In a letter to the First Minister, Powys County Council joined calls for a fairer funding formula, stating that

'It is time that the funding formula underwent a comprehensive review and that rural authorities like Powys had a fair deal. We are not asking for special treatment but for fair play...The financial and social environment facing local government has changed beyond all recognition since the funding formula was introduced. It is time that formula was changed to reflect the world we live in today.'

The Welsh Government's amendment to this motion asked us to recognise that the funding formula for Welsh local authorities is reviewed annually through a partnership between Welsh local government and Welsh Government. However, as the Welsh Local Government Association has previously stated, their finance distribution sub-group has limited influence on the formula, stating in 2016 that, 'the distribution sub-group produces a report. It's usually a report of what the group has covered on its work programme. It's usually a small part of the formula. The distribution sub-group only deals with a few tweaks and changes annually. We, the WLGA, ended up agreeing to that as an association. That's not an agreement that the whole formula is right; it's just an agreement that we've delivered on the sub-group's work programme.'

Although the independent commission on local government finance Wales report in 2016 recommended that the existing revenue support grant formula be frozen and an independent grants commission be established to oversee the development and future operation of a new grant distribution formula, this has not happened. The Welsh Government's review of local government finance only mentions development of the settlement formula, rather than a full-scale review, stating that the formula has become more complex since its inception, and there is merit in exploring the scope for simplification and changes to aid transparency and operation. As I've evidenced, however, the need for urgent action goes much further than these carefully crafted, empty words, and instead of hiding behind local government, a responsible Welsh Government would be taking the lead.