Look, I wonder if we can just start with the obvious here, which is that no Government likes cutting local authority funding and no council likes putting up council tax. I think what is less obvious, despite some of the assertions made in this Chamber, is why this is happening and why the difficult task of local government funding reform, when that might begin, because it's just too easy to try and shut down the debate, as we heard in earlier questions and some of the representations today, by pointing the finger at the UK Government. If that's all you're going to say in replying to this debate, Minister, we may as well all go home now, because constituents are also looking as to where the decisions about how spending on services nationally and within their communities are prioritised. And that's the work that is done in this Chamber and in chambers in our council areas.

Whatever budget decisions are made in London, the funding floor ensures that this Government has more to spend on those services per head than they do in England, and that is a figure that was agreed with the current Labour First Minister. Your predecessor, Minister, said that blaming the Tories is not a strategy for the future and blaming austerity and carrying on business as usual is short sighted. The former Labour leader of one of the councils in my region says pretty much the same: 'The easy and lazy option when it comes to local government is to blame austerity and the Tories. It too often ignores other factors such as poor decision making when it comes to both budgets and service delivery. The writing was on the wall for most authorities even before 2008, which of course was the date of the crash and when we still had a Labour Government at Westminster.'

I think they have a point. It goes back to what Lynne Neagle was saying about looking at this afresh. But I don't think that point is universally accurate. Some of our local authorities have had no room for manoeuvre for many years—no space to make poor decisions—but not all of them. The fact that they've been broadly the same councils that do relatively well and relatively poorly over this period of years I think is now strikingly apparent. And if the reason that those councils that do relatively well—and I'm saying 'relatively'—is primarily due to waiting for deprivation, then I think it's fair to ask why those council areas are still so deprived and still have quite high levels of useable reserves. Other councils have had to deal with their challenges with considerably less per capita funding and reserves.

Now, yes, of course I realise that the needs of every council area are different, but this disparity between them is now clearly unfair, and I think it's been brought about by the application of a formula built on out-of-date irrelevant data over a number of years. If this formula were fair and the difficulty is due wholly to the UK Government shrinking the size of the overall pot, you would expect council taxes across Wales to rise at broadly the same rate. That's clearly not the case and the differences are too stark to be explained away by local conditions or just poor budgeting. Powys, as we've heard, is having to raise its council tax by twice as much as Neath Port Talbot, and that is not marginal. Neath Port Talbot has had the fourth highest rise and Powys the hardest cut, so it would be easy to draw, this year, something of an obvious conclusion. But Pembrokeshire, which is charging 10 per cent—almost as much as last year—actually had a rise, albeit the most modest, but I'm using these two examples to speak to the financial starvation of particular councils over many years, not just recently, going back as far as 2008—