Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:46 pm on 3 February 2021.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:46, 3 February 2021

Indeed. Thank you very much, Delyth. Yes, so, absolutely, we know that the bottom three councils are a little below the average. So, we've got Ceredigion, Wrexham and Caerphilly below the average, but all of them have got positive settlements. So, Ceredigion has 2 per cent—that's the lowest settlement—but 2 per cent is the planning assumption that we had been working on with the treasurers throughout the year, because it's always very difficult for us to know what the settlement to us will be from the UK Government. And, indeed, I have to say that, at this point in time we still don't know what that settlement will be, which obviously puts us in a very difficult position. We're in the process of my colleague Rebecca Evans trying to work out what the best way of dealing with that is. 

And the formula, of course, is based on the finance sub-group and the distribution sub-group of the local authority and Welsh Government partnership council, which has representatives of treasurers and external people, and so on, on it. We've rehearsed it many times—and the Llywydd is almost certainly going to lose patience with me if I start going through the various aspects of the distribution sub-group formula—but the basic premise of it is that the things that are set out there are the things that are most important. So, they are based on population, deprivation, scarcity and rurality, and various other things of that sort that are beyond the control of the council to control. So, they're not based on local decisions that could make a big swing in the way that the council deploys its resources. So, I'd be surprised to find that on a 2 per cent rise, albeit it's less than the average across Wales, any council should be making swingeing cuts of any sort, because that was the planning assumption on which we were basing our projections until very recently.

In terms of the floor, the floor was always there to stop a negative impact on a council—so, where you had a settlement that was below zero and so they were actually dropping from the previous year. The floor was never there to make everybody come to the average. So, there are three things to be considered and, obviously, as we're in the middle of the provisional settlement at the moment, I'm not in a position to say today what the final settlement will be—it's some weeks off yet and there are number of things to work through. But the current situation is that we don't know what our funding envelope will look like and, if we did put a funding floor in, that funding floor would have to come from the envelope that the settlement is in. So, effectively, what you'd be doing is taking money off some councils and giving it to others. So, on that basis, obviously the people who are having the money removed from them are not going to be very happy. The WLGA have written to me and asked for a funding floor on the basis that it's externally funded by the Welsh Government, and that's not something that I'm in any position to say we would be able to do at this point in time. But, again, we're not yet at the final budget and so I am not, I'm afraid, Delyth, in a position to say today where that would be. But I would say that we're happy to work with Ceredigion about why it would say that a 2 per cent rise would result in those kinds of issues because that was the planning assumption that all councils were asked to work to.