Rising Living Costs

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:17 pm on 11 January 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:17, 11 January 2022

I thank Peter Fox for that. I think the single advice fund does, in many ways, address some of the issues that Peter Fox has raised, because it is a single service and people get the advice they need across a whole range of different issues, whether it's fuel poverty or problems with paying council tax, and so on. So, I think that was a conscious effort to streamline the advice services that we have here in Wales, and make them as easy as possible for people to use them.

Peter Fox makes an important point about passporting. One of the problems of universal credit is that it has broken the automatic passport that was there before for people claiming housing benefit then being able to claim council tax benefit. It's not easy for the Welsh Government to repair that broken link ourselves. But I can say to the Member that discussions have been had with the UK Government as to how we can more automatically make the help that's available through the council tax benefit scheme available to people who are newly qualifying for housing benefit and who, at the moment, have to make a separate claim in a way that they didn't previously in order to get help from the council tax benefit scheme.

So, the system is notoriously complex and the more you try to fine-tune it to be able to help people with different parts of their lives, the more complexity tends to get built into the system. But here in Wales, we are at least in a position where we have a national council tax benefit scheme, a national scheme for the discretionary assistance fund, a national scheme that will allow up to 350,000 households in Wales to benefit from a winter fuel payment, and a Government that is committed, on that national basis, to introducing the real living wage wherever we can. It's all part of an effort to try and make sure that we protect people in Wales, especially those with the least, against the cost of living crisis that is coming their way.