Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 1:40 pm on 13 January 2021.
Thank you very much for raising the support for business, because protecting both lives and livelihoods have been our priorities during our response to the pandemic. And you'll see some significant allocations in terms of our approach to the economy and supporting jobs and creating jobs in our draft budget, which has been published and which we had the opportunity to debate yesterday. But I'm really aware that there are still individuals and businesses that have not yet been reached by support for a variety of reasons, and that's one of the reasons why my colleague the Deputy Minister and Chief Whip recently met with ExcludedUK to better understand the challenges that the people they represent are facing. And, of course, we'll continue to press the UK Government for further support as well, in terms of meeting the needs of businesses, because we see this very much as a joint effort. There's a specific role very much for the UK Government, in terms of furlough and so on, and we always aim to augment and enhance what's available, which is why we're able to provide the best possible support package anywhere in the UK.
We have sought, on a number of occasions, to meet the gaps that we understood were already there. So, you'll recall that we introduced the £5 million start-up grant to support businesses that had started up in 2019 with a grant of £2,500 each. And we've also introduced a £10.5 million fund for the freelance community, which, again, we knew had been falling through some of the gaps. And, further to that, we have confirmed that discretionary support will continue to be available through local authorities so that they're able to support businesses who aren't on the non-domestic rates system and who have been materially impacted by the pandemic, and, there, those discretionary grants of up to £2,000 are available. But, of course, we're always looking to see what more we can do to support people who have not managed to access any support thus far.