Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 1:45 pm on 16 October 2019.
Well, I think it’s important to reflect on the reasons why local government have been struggling in recent years, and that’s very much because of the fact that their budgets have been decreasing as Welsh Government’s budget has been decreasing. Last year, there was funding that was well below the funding that they would have had even 10 years before that, so I think that it’s important to reflect on the difficulties there. It’s also important, I think, to remember that whilst the Barnett formula giveth it also taketh away, and this is one of the issues that we are trying to grapple with at the moment, in terms of the most recent spending rounds. So, there was a negative adjustment by the UK Government of around £180 million. Now, we can understand about half of it, but there does remain an outstanding amount, of £90 million, which we just can’t account for. So, we are in dialogue with the UK Government to explore whether we can find some answers to that. But if nothing’s forthcoming, obviously we’ll have to take that through the disputes to the Joint Ministerial Committee.