Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:57 pm on 5 October 2021.
Thank you very much, Jenny Rathbone. I recognise your roles here today as Chair of the Equality and Social Justice Committee and also having been a member of the previous Public Accounts Committee, and you're absolutely right, we can't afford not to use this Act in terms of the impact of COVID-19, particularly, which has had an impact on how we've been able to respond to the legislation over the past year at the end of the first five years of the Act and also the decade of austerity and, indeed, the committee even looked at the impact of Brexit as well in its considerations.
But I will respond to that key recommendation. Accepting in principle or in full is about have you got full control over saying 'yes' to some things, so in terms of public services boards funding, it has been our policy that it's for the boards themselves to decide how they collectively resource their work, including pooling funding, and there are some good examples of how boards have taken this forward. But, there have been varying degrees of success, and it's reflected in the report, about pooling funding or drawing on funds outside of the budget of those particular PSBs. So, what we need to do is work with the PSBs, the public services boards, to learn the lessons of the past and current work to pool resources to get some common practice on effective pooling of funding between members, but also look at how we can raise awareness of the range of other funding sources available and how they can access them, and then also—and this is crucially important in terms of the Welsh Government's response—consider annually the package of funding and support Welsh Government must make available directly to PSBs. So, there were a lot of elements in that very good recommendation that I'm responding to where we can in principle and then in full respond to it. So, we aim to complete the funding work ready for them to deliver on their next well-being plans from May 2023, because it's crucially important—we have to assist them in delivering their local assessments of well-being.