Part of 2. Questions to the Counsel General and Brexit Minister (in respect of his Brexit Minister responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 2:47 pm on 8 May 2019.
I thank the Member for that question. We welcomed the report from the Wales Audit Office, as she will know. We felt it was a recognition that there were significant amounts of work happening across public services in Wales to deal with the unwelcome consequences of leaving the European Union. She's right to say there was at that point, in the report, a reference to variability across public services, although I think the evidence taken, which underlay that report, was from a few months before that. But she's recognised in her question the work we've done with the WLGA to enable best practice to be shared across local authorities.
We've also made available, in response to a request from local authorities in Wales, additional funding to build capacity in order to ensure that there's a staffing resource, if you like, in local authorities to co-ordinate and lead the operational work local authorities are doing. We've made available £1.2 million from the EU transition fund in order to support that work. There is a very high level of engagement with local authorities through the local government EU preparedness advisory panel and through the partnership council, which enables those opportunities to share best practice.
I know that, when local authority cabinets have looked at how they can assess their own readiness, they have looked to the experiences of other councils when they've undertaken their own analysis, so that they've learnt from that best practice. I think there was an example recently—I think I'm right in saying—in Torfaen, of them doing exactly that and using that as a tool for assessing their own readiness.