2. What assessment has the Welsh Government made of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on local government resources? OQ55709

The pandemic has placed additional financial pressure on local authorities arising from new responsibilities, additional costs and loss of income. We are providing up to £0.5 billion of funding to support local authorities, and are continuing to work closely with the WLGA and local government to assess and respond to the impact.

Thank you, Minister. As Audit Wales point out in their recent report, Wales's councils will struggle financially, despite nearly £0.5 billion in additional funding from the Welsh Government, and, while everyone looks to central Governments for action on tackling the pandemic, it's local government that are implementing the measures and keeping our schools open. Minister, what discussions has the Welsh Government held with the UK Government regarding additional resources to tackle the pandemic, so that we don't see cuts to vital local services, such as day care or library services, next year? Thank you.

My colleague Rebecca Evans has had a series of discussions with Treasury and other officials at UK Government level, obviously emphasising the need for as much certainty as is humanly possible in the budgets going forward. This has not been helped by various announcements from the UK Government about changing the normal rota, if you like, of budget announcements and so on. But she's been working very hard on that. In the meantime, we have worked very closely with local government across the piece to ensure that we understand exactly where they are in terms of both cash flow and additional demands on their resource, and I'm very pleased to say that, through the local government hardship fund, which has been made available through our COVID-19 fund more generally in the Government, we've been able to meet all of those demands and work in harmony with local authorities to understand the pressures going forward.

Minister, I recently spoke with Monmouthshire County Council leader Peter Fox, who told me that the pandemic has understandably had a massive impact on local government resources and they are worried about the medium-term sustainability of statutory services, let alone non-statutory services. Monmouthshire County Council has seen a huge fall-off in funding this year, including business rates, but also from usually dependable sources such as parking charges. As the COVID-19 situation continues to deteriorate, what discussions have you had with Monmouthshire County Council and other local authority leaders regarding resilience over the winter months to reassure them that funding support will be available to them as swiftly as possible so that they in turn are able to support local businesses and local services?

Thank you for that. We have a very large range of liaison meetings with local authorities. I meet with the leaders extremely regularly; my officials and Rebecca Evans's officials meet with treasurer and other officials in the Welsh Local Government Association and individual local authorities so that we have as good a shared picture going forward as we possibly can between us of what the pressures look like in each individual local authority.

The local authority hardship fund has been set up on an actuals basis, paid quarterly in arrears, in order to be able to cover off the individual circumstances of each local authority, and, as you've just rightly pointed out, Monmouth, for example, is heavily reliant—more reliant than other authorities in Wales—on council tax revenues, because of the structure of the revenue support grant distribution formula and other support networks. So, we're working very hard with them to understand on an individual basis the effect of their particular circumstances and to work with them in terms of putting claims into the hardship fund, as I say, on an actuals basis in order to get the money out to them.

We also upfronted the revenue support grant payments at the beginning of the year in order to ensure that they didn't have cash-flow problems. So, it isn't a problem for them to claim the actual expenditure back in arrears. So, I'm as confident as I can be that we're on top of that situation. Much will, of course, depend on what the UK Government does in terms of a rollover budget or a comprehensive spending review or whatever it is we're looking at. In the meantime, we work very closely with local government to understand what the various scenarios might look like for them.

Minister, you've answered basically the very important questions, and I'm very much appreciative of the extra funding the Welsh Government has given to local authorities to ensure they can face the difficult times, because there's a large amount of loss of income as well as the challenging costs that they're incurring. As we see this COVID-19 epidemic continuing into the winter, we're now seeing a situation where previously councils were able to reallocate staff to different jobs, but those staff are going back to their jobs and therefore there's now going to be a demand upon them as they need to deliver those services, plus additional services for COVID-19. Are you confident that the funding from the UK Government will be sufficient to ensure that local authorities are able to ensure that they can deliver all their services and the additional services that the COVID-19 epidemic, which is re-raising its head, will require?

Thank you, David. That gives me the opportunity, which I'm very grateful for, to really appreciate the effort and work that local authority staff at all levels have put in, and I would actually just like to take this opportunity to encourage them, where at all possible, to make sure they take some leave and recharge their batteries as we go into, as you rightly say, what might be a very difficult autumn and winter indeed.

The local government hardship fund makes available £0.5 billion, as I said, to support local authorities to the end of the financial year, and, as you rightly said, local authorities were able to redeploy staff to areas of greatest need at the beginning of the pandemic, when other services were shut or not operating to full capacity. And as the range of services has reopened, of course that's much more difficult for them to do. And as a result of that, we've made it clear that authorities are able to claim for both overtime costs and for additional staffing costs from the hardship fund, and we've already paid for additional staff, for example, to run the community hubs over school holidays and to administer the business grants for us. Other key areas going forward are supply cover for teachers having to self isolate, cover for waste operatives that are self-isolating and costs for cover for extra care staff, to name just a few. There is a long, long list of staff that might be in that particular area. It's those areas particularly where people can't work from home that are the most pressured and that we're particularly supporting.

We've also put extra funding in place where we're asking local authorities to deliver extra services for us as a result of the pandemic, so one example is the track and trace teams. We've asked health boards and local authorities to use redeployed staff where possible, but we have put in place a budget of £45 million, for example, to cover the excess costs of additional staff. So we are working very hard with them to understand the staffing and other pressures and to make sure that we can cover that off.