Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:32 pm on 14 October 2020.
Thank you, Mark. We did rehearse a little bit of this during my recent appearance at the local government committee, during which I was answering some scrutiny questions on the response to COVID-19. So the answer to that is contained in the answer I've just given to a number of Members earlier, which is that we are working with each individual local authority to enable us to understand their very specific circumstances: what their reserve position is; what they would have expected to receive in fees and charges and council tax and national non-domestic rates; what their reduction in income looks like; what their additional costs are; what their particular circumstances in that particular local authority are, in order to be able to assist them in making claims for the hardship fund, which, as I've emphasised on a number of occasions, is paid out on actuals, rather than any kind of formula-driven approach, so that we can understand where each local authority is and understand its resilience plans and so on.
There are a large number of reasons why different levels of reserve are held in different authorities: as a result of locally determined policies; as a result of earmarked reserves for particular capital projects; and a large number of other reasons too numerous to mention here. So I'm confident, at the moment, that we are on top of that and that we are not in a position where any local authority in Wales faces any particular financial crisis, but, of course, much depends on the UK Government's attitude to budgets going forward. I'd very much hoped that we would have a comprehensive spending review that would have allowed us to give some certainty over a three-year, at least, budget, but that doesn't look like it's going to be so now, and obviously if you have to plan on a year-on-year basis for local authorities that's much more difficult to do in terms of long-term planning and leads to some undesirable short-term effects.
But we've worked very well with local authorities; we've co-operated very well. I'm very grateful indeed to the officers of the local authorities and the WLGA and to all my officials who've worked extremely hard through this period to make sure that we have resilient local government in Wales.