5. Will the Minister provide an update on the additional resources being made available to local authorities to deal with current pressures? OQ55327

7. What assessment has the Minister made of the additional financial pressures facing local government because of the Covid-19 pandemic? OQ55328

8. Will the Minister make a statement on the support provided to county, town and community councils during the Covid-19 pandemic? OQ55317

Thank you, Russell.  

Nick. 

It's not Russell; it's Nick. 

Sorry, Nick. I beg your pardon. 

We sound very similar. 

You don't all. But, sadly, I didn't bring my glasses with me from Swansea—[Laughter.]—

There's no Churchill behind me. 

Shall we just move on to the answer? 

I should have spotted that. Sorry. Apologies, Nick. Serious apologies. The pandemic has placed additional financial pressures on local authorities arising from new responsibilities, additional costs and loss of income. We're providing £188 million in funding in support of these and working closely with the WLGA to continue to assess and respond to impacts from the pandemic. 

Thank you, Minister. And we've already heard from other Members about the extra pressures that local authorities are facing at the moment. They're obviously facing a large loss of income and have been now for some months, but also they're facing the additional pressures, as we move forward, of reforming town centres, et cetera, to allow for social distancing. Also, the planning system will be under strain, and there's probably quite a backlog developing in the planning system. So, all of these issues—. What support have you given to local authorities? And what discussions have you had with the WLGA to make sure that, as we come out of the pandemic, local authorities are in a position to deal with the challenges ahead and don't end up actually having more significant problems in the future than they have at the moment?

Yes, absolutely. They've faced an enormous range of both pressures and difficulties in loss of income, as you say, and the loss of income is from a range of things, including fees and charges from simple things like car parks and leisure centres, right up to the loss of non-domestic rates income, council tax income—more people claiming council tax relief scheme moneys, for example—and we've yet to see what happens to the collection rates for council tax. So, we've been working very closely with local authorities at official level, and myself with the leaders, and also with the WLGA. I have very, very frequent meetings with the WLGA and its leadership and its officials to do that. So, for example, right now, we're currently working on a piece that seeks to understand what the impact of the increased demand on the council tax relief fund is and what the collection rates might look like so we that we can start to put in place measures to protect against some of the ramifications of that. 

Right at the beginning of the pandemic, we brought forward the May and June revenue support grant payments, which is a total of £526 million, into April, to support local authorities' cash flow in the initial stages of the pandemic, and they stepped up to that plate, because we didn’t want them to worry about cash flow while they did the right thing, and they've very seriously stepped up to that plate.

The hardship fund provides £110 million for the additional costs, and a further £78 million specifically for loss of income. And we've been providing a series of other moneys into local authorities for some of the initiatives that you mentioned, and, of course, they've still got all the transport grants and all the rest of it that they had in the past.

So, what we've been doing is working very well as a team to understand, right across a range of pressures, what that looks like and to be able to meet those as they come forward, and to work with local authorities in particular, actually, because they've taken on things like test, trace and protect for us and, as you know, they administer the shielded food box scheme for us. And we need to understand how those brilliant things they've done really well with are staffed up as we start to ease the lockdown and staff go back to their normal duties. So, we need to understand the impact of that. So, we’ve worked very closely on that all the way through.

Minister, I've said to you before that I think local authorities have been outstanding in their response to the COVID emergency, and I am really grateful to Torfaen council for everything that they've done. But I am very clear that they are under immense financial pressures now, and nowhere more so than in social care. I very much welcome the additional £40 million that was announced for local authorities for social care, but they have so far only seen some of that money, and I do believe it is crucial now that local authorities see the cold, hard cash in this area. Can I ask if you will discuss this with the Deputy Minister to see what action Government can take to ensure that as much money as possible reaches the front line as soon as possible? Thank you.

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.

Minister, you've now got a question from me. [Laughter.] Thank you. Minister, you've outlined support for local authorities, but I've had a number of town and community councils contact me, and I'm aware that some of those councils are suffering significantly—perhaps some more than others. So, if I do give the example of Welshpool Town Council, for example, it suffered loss from income losses through its day centre, the closure of the tourist information centre, the market, and from letting out its community facilities. So, income loss may well go into the hundreds of thousands of pounds for this particular town council. I appreciate each town and community council will be different, but what specific funding and support might be available for this specific tier of government?

So, the community councils—I can confirm that those facing the most financial hardship through lost income are eligible to draw on the hardship fund. So, that's available to them.

But, like for principal councils, we expect community and town councils who are experiencing lost income to look, in the first instance, at what support they can draw on immediately: so, such things as the furlough scheme, job retention scheme, grant from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs where appropriate, utilising reserves, applying to the principal council to bring forward precept instalments to ease cash flow and so on—so, that's exactly the same set of rules as we apply to the principal councils—and then to come to us with a set-out spreadsheet, if you like, of what the lost income is and what mitigating arrangements they've put in place, what they've been able to do, so that we can consider it as part of the claims system that we have for the hardship fund. So, they're treated exactly the same as the principal councils in that regard.

Thank you. We go back to the questions on the order paper. Question 6—Jack Sargeant.