1. Will the Minister make a statement on the funding allocation to Anglesey County Council for 2020-21? OAQ54481

Yes. I intend to announce the provisional local government settlement on 26 November, a week after the planned Welsh Government draft budget. This will provide details of the core funding for councils for 2020-21. Alongside the settlement, I will publish early indications of specific grants for the coming financial year.

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Ann Jones) took the Chair.

Thank you very much. First of all, will the Minister join me in congratulating Isle of Anglesey County Council on being judged the second best in Wales in a new study? The Plaid Cymru leader, Llinos Medi, and her team deserve all praise, as well as the previous chief executive, Gwyn Jones, and his team. And may I wish his successor, Annwen Morgan, well as she starts on her work? But, that success has come in the face of serious financial challenges. The council had to make cuts of about £2.5 million this year, bringing the total cuts to about £25 million. And the only way that they managed to balance the books this year was with an increase in council tax of almost 10 per cent, as with many other councils. But that can't be an option for the next year. There’s nowhere left to cut, other than education and social care, and with the significant improvement in children’s services and the increased pressure on adult services, we can't put those services for the most vulnerable in jeopardy.

With inflation and demand for services, the council needs an additional £6 million next year just to remain in the same place. An increase in council tax of 5 per cent, which is still too much, would bring in £2 million, but on top of that there will need to be £4 million in addition—not a flat budget, not a freeze, not saving them from further cuts, not specific grants, but additional funding in the core budget. Does the Minister realise that that’s the situation that we're facing? Does she realise that councils' preventative work is saving money for other services, such as health service, and there’s nowhere left to cut on Anglesey? We need a promise and we need certainty that there will be a change.

Yes, I've some sympathy with what the Member is saying about the situation that local authorities find themselves in across Wales. I just want to start off by saying that I'm very happy to join him in congratulating Ynys Môn. Llinos has done an amazing job there. She's a very inspirational young woman, the sort of person we should be attracting into politics in greater numbers. She's been very lovely to work with on the innovative housing programme, and they've done some splendid work, so I'm extremely happy to join with you in saying that. Congratulations to her and to her team, both the previous and the incoming. 

In terms of the overarching pressure, Anglesey, as you know, was one of the people who were on the funding floor last time. They received the additional funding that we had, just to make sure that no council went down below 0.2 per cent, I think it was. We did that because we didn't want people to have huge fluctuations in funding in the teeth of austerity. This is the ninth year of austerity. We make no pretence that any local authority in Wales is doing anything other than making horrible choices about much-needed programmes. I've said this before: we are not cutting 'nice to have' things here. These are to-the-bone cuts, so I absolutely acknowledge that.

We've been working really hard with the Welsh Local Government Association to understand across the piece exactly what we're looking at. I've been working very hard with my colleague the Minister for finance to make sure that we have the best possible settlement, given where we are. I won't repeat all of where we are at the moment, but we have promises of some consequentials, but they are just promises at the moment. We've not yet seen a budget, votes in the House of Commons or anything else. We're obviously in highly volatile times, but we are going ahead and planning as much as we can for the future. We've had a good relationship with the WLGA, a very good meeting with them in both the partnership council and the finance sub-group, an open and transparent conversation about where we are with the funding and where we will be going forward. So, I can't say anything more than that at the moment; we are working very hard to do that.

The other thing I would say—and I know that local government is very interested in this—we are working very hard across the Government to get the specific grants in place as fast as we can, and to make sure that there are no inadvertent cuts in budgets elsewhere as a result of movements across the Government. So, it's a quite complex piece of work, but we hope to present them with an as certain as possible and as early as possible indication of what they'll get, so that they're in the best possible place to plan for the future. But I accept what you are saying: we are absolutely in a situation where people are making really difficult choices about services going forward.

The Welsh Government tells us that its local government funding formula is heavily influenced by deprivation indicators. Anglesey is one of five local authorities where 30 per cent or more of workers are paid less than the voluntary living wage, and prosperity levels per head in Anglesey are the lowest in Wales at just under half of those in Cardiff. Yet, this financial year, Cardiff had a 0.9 per cent uplift, because you indicate Anglesey was in the group with the biggest cuts alongside four others, including Conwy and Flintshire. How will you ensure that a better measurement of those deprivation indicators will not put Anglesey and other affected councils in a similar position again?

The distribution sub-group of the partnership council works very hard on the indicators across the piece. We have a constant review group working very hard on making sure that the indicators are as they are. The local government family is itself responsible for this, and Anglesey, as many other councils, have seats on both the financial and the distribution sub-group. The leader of Anglesey, who I was just mentioning now, comes to the partnership council meetings; I meet with her very frequently. Anglesey, last year, suffered from a range of less-favourable movements in indicators, such as population projections, secondary school pupil numbers, primary free school meals and children in out-of-work families, and those indicators fluctuate. So, obviously, the distribution works differently according to a range of indicators. I've had this conversation with Members many times; we offer all the time that a local authority who thinks that the measures are not right should come forward and put its suggested adjustments into the distribution sub-group formula, and we work through what that would mean for the local authority family overall. That offer is always on the table, as it is now.