7. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: Preparing our public services in Wales for a 'no deal' Brexit

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:28 pm on 1 October 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 5:28, 1 October 2019

Well, thank you very much for that, Dai Lloyd. We have been working very hard behind the scenes to plan, but just to be clear, there is no way to cover off all of the risks inherent in a 'no deal' Brexit, and I echo my colleague Vaughan Gething's remarks about the real shame of watching money that could otherwise be spent on improving services and assisting communities being spent on preparations that are, we hope, entirely needless but must be carried out.

There have been specific sums of money—and I detailed in the statement—around capital support to local authorities to do a range of things, including looking at traffic impact assessments and so on. Some of them were detailed by other colleagues who spoke here today. Each local authority has been asked to use the Grant Thornton impact assessment study to discover what it needs to do specifically, and obviously those authorities with ports in them will have had specific advice and help from transport officials who are in the Welsh Government and elsewhere to plan for that.

But, in the end, of course, we are preparing for the classic known unknowns and also unknown unknowns, and all we can do is make sure that our resilience fora are ready and willing to step up to the plate as soon as we realise what the task in front of us entails. But I have to say that my heart just breaks for the things that we could have done with this money and that we're now not able to do while we shoot ourselves in the foot for no apparent reason.