Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:57 pm on 9 March 2022.
Thank you for the question, and I'll just repeat again, really, that authorities have to strike that balance between maintaining services and considering the pressure on households, without being drawn into commenting on any particular authority's decisions, because these are decisions for local authorities to take, and it's not really for Welsh Government to dictate what those might be. Of course, there is a power to cap an increase, but that's not a power that we've yet used, and from what I'm hearing about the kind of levels that authorities are thinking about, although there is a range, we're not at that point where we're high into double figures where we would be really talking about using that power to cap and so on. So, it is, I think, for local authorities to make these choices at this current time.
On that point about a bonfire of the debts, which I know is something that has been raised from a number of quarters—I've looked at this to see if it would even be possible. Local authorities don't have the legal power to cancel debts in that kind of way. They have a power to work with individuals and then to take decisions on that individual basis, but they don't have that kind of power just to be able to wipe out debts. So, that, legally, isn't an option. But they can work with individuals, and we did work with local authorities to provide a framework for them to do so to ensure that they are able to identify struggling households and then to work alongside them to explore whether they're claiming all the benefits that they are entitled to and so on, or whether the family or household needs some kind of other additional support. So, I'm not going to get drawn in on individual councils, but just to say that they do have abilities to provide individual support to households.