The Local Government Budget

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:47 pm on 16 September 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:47, 16 September 2020

So, on the second quarter point, I can absolutely tell you that we will be paying—the hardship fund runs right through the second quarter, and we've made that clear to local authority treasurers, chief executives and leaders in our weekly contact, which is still going on.

In terms of the planning assumptions, we have started—we're all way behind on where we should be normally in terms of budget planning, which may not be a surprise. We've been a bit distracted by the pandemic, obviously, and just keeping services going. I would just take this opportunity to pay tribute to our local authority partners, who have absolutely pulled out the stops and been quite tremendous in staffing our community hubs, helping with our shielding programme and now our public sector-based TTP programme. We really could not have done this unless they had stepped up to that plate. And so, we wanted to make sure that they didn't have additional money worries while they were doing that and that they could keep carrying on with essential services. So, the homelessness example is a good one there. So, we could have put a lot of money into homelessness, but if we'd cut the housing budget or not kept it where it was, then it would just have been dissipated. But we didn't do that; we kept the funding up and we've given them the additional funding.

So, on the planning assumptions, we've just started to talk to them about what we're expecting by way of a reasonable worst-case scenario, a break-even and so on, and that's tied up, of course, with the UK Government's comprehensive spending review, which they're now talking about.

And so, we hope—and I understand the Llywydd has had some discussion with my colleague, Rebecca Evans, on this—that we'll be able to halt the normal budget timescale for the Senedd, but it does depend on the comprehensive spending review going ahead as planned and us understanding what comes out of that before we can pass it on to our partners. But we will be working with them in a co-production way to understand what the base assumptions look like and what are the various types of planning. So, if we all plan for 1 per cent cut, what would that mean for services, or if we all plan for break even, and so on, as we do? It is, though, more compressed this year than we would normally expect.