I welcome this opportunity to discuss local government. In fact, I welcome any opportunity to discuss local government and I wish we had more of these debates on local government. I might not agree with what's been said by Mark Isherwood, Suzy Davies and Russell George, but I think it's important we get this debate and discussion taking place in front of everybody.

Can I say, first of all, that this is taking place against a background of Tory austerity—a political policy, not an economic one? But what actually happens here? The percentage of the Welsh budget spent on health has increased year on year. As local government was the other large budget funded by the Welsh Government, it has gone down. But when you consider some of the services covered by local government—education, social services, highways, refuse collection, trading standards, food hygiene, pollution, sports facilities, homelessness and planning—it is easy to see how important local government and local services are. I stopped at 10, I could've kept on going, but I don't think anybody would have liked to have listened for five minutes to a list of what local government does.

As the funding that local government gets from the Welsh Government, under the catchy title of 'aggregate external funding', goes down, two things happen: council services reduce, with council tax and charges increasing. There is a widely held belief by many council tax payers that their council tax pays for the services provided by the council. What has happened in recent years is that council tax has increased while services have reduced, and council tax payers have had a variety of reactions, varying between angry and confused. This is because council tax pays for less than a quarter of the total council services, with the rest being funded by the rate support grant and the councils' share of the universal business rates. I'm sure the Conservatives would like to apologise for the decision taken by the Conservative Government in the past, where they centralised and nationalised the business rate, because local authorities should be able to set their own local business rates. Now, it's all set centrally, and that has an effect.

On business rates—