Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:52 pm on 25 February 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:52, 25 February 2020

I thank Adam Price for those questions. He is right to say that what the Welsh Government has done is to focus upon the immediate aftermath of the floods to make sure that we provide funding for individual householders directly affected, to pay for the clean-up costs of local authorities, to be able to begin to help businesses to get back on their feet. We can cover those costs from within our own budgets, by very careful management and drawing together of funds from different parts of Government. But beyond the immediate impact, when local authorities have major infrastructure repairs to be carried out, then that is not going to be £10 million, that's going to be tens and tens of millions of pounds. My colleague, Rebecca Evans wrote to the Treasury yesterday, formally setting out the fact that we will be looking to the Treasury for assistance with that bill.

It isn't possible, at this point, Llywydd, to put a precise figure on how much that will be, because some of the damage that will need to be repaired is literally still under water, so it hasn't been possible to get engineers down to look at the scale of the damage and to give us an assessment of what it will cost to put it right. The figure that Adam Price has referred to, which comes from RCT, I think is not an unreasonable estimate of what the damage in that county may be, and there's damage in many other parts of Wales, as well.