Additional Resources for Local Authorities

Part of 4. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:47 pm on 24 June 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:47, 24 June 2020

Thank you, Lynne. I have regular meetings with both the Minister for health and the Deputy Minister for health, and in fact we had one only last night to discuss this very issue. The system so far has been on a claims basis. It's not distributed in quite the way that you would normally see moneys. So, what we've been doing is asking local authorities to claim back additional expenses they have as a result of increasing commissioning rates or helping to assist with voids or assisting with additional costs that various providers have, both in-house and out-house. And indeed, last night, we were just discussing, going forward, what we’re going to do with another tranche of money that we're hoping to get in order to continue to support care homes as we work through the pandemic, because it's absolutely imperative not only that we have the best care in our care homes, but that they're able to financially survive and still be there at the other side of the pandemic, so that we don't have people disrupted for no reason. So, that's very much an ongoing conversation between myself and the Ministers, and between us and local authorities and the care sector. And I can tell you that we discuss it very, very regularly indeed.