2. What consideration did the Minister give to supporting the introduction of community wealth-building strategies when allocating the budgets of local authorities in South Wales West? OQ57934

The economy Minister announced a £1 million backing local firms fund to support the local economy across Wales to deliver more of the products and services required by the public sector. Together with a significantly increased local government settlement, this helps to create more and better jobs closer to home.

Diolch, Weinidog. Our communities have all suffered due to the economic effects of COVID, and this has been compounded of course by the cost-of-living crisis, which is hitting our most disadvantaged areas the hardest. As well as mitigating these crises now, we also need to be ensuring that our communities are resilient enough to be able to weather any future economic storms. So now more than ever our local authorities should prioritise ambitious community wealth-building strategies, utilising procurement spend by local anchors for community benefit. Promises have been made by local authorities, such as by Neath Port Talbot in my region to regenerate its Valleys communities, but the reality on the ground shows those strategies have simply failed to deliver. Gwynedd Council's Keeping the Benefit Local strategy, which considers how best to keep money spent by the council in the local area, is certainly a model to be encouraged in South Wales West. Over the past four years, the amount of council spending staying inside the county increased from £56 million to £78 million, a rise of 39 per cent. Does the Minister agree that the Welsh Government needs to show more leadership on this, and ensure that funding and support are available to local authorities to devise and implement effective community wealth-building strategies, which will create sustainable, resilient communities, to achieve much-needed social and economic transformation?

I'm grateful to Sioned for raising an important issue, especially in the context of having those resilient communities as we move into a very difficult period. And we are absolutely committed, as a Welsh Government, to strengthening the foundational economy here in Wales. We have engaged with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, CLES, to work across five clusters of public services boards, to examine the community wealth-building potential offered through progressive procurement. And, as a result, PSB members have identified procurement priorities, such as increasing engagement with local and third sector suppliers—for example, on housing retrofit, procurement of local food, and also on decarbonisation of supply chains. And the engagement of CLES has also helped to raise awareness of the other pillars of community wealth building, such as how we use our assets and buildings, and also the importance of local workforce strategies, and how they can all work together to support those local well-being priorities. So, absolutely, this is a key focus of my colleague the Minister for Economy. I think we've got good work to build on, in terms of the work that we've done with CLES, the work the public services boards have been doing, and also there are some great examples in terms of what's happening in individual local authorities. The Vale of Glamorgan foundational economy challenge fund, for example, has succeeded in engaging with more than 1,000 new businesses, through events with Business Wales, Sell2Wales, and others, to help understand some of those tendering problems that were preventing small businesses from tendering for their work. So, I think that's been a useful piece of work, and we can certainly explore how we would share the learning from that to other local authorities across Wales.

Now, as we plan for our economic renewal, there are huge opportunities for communities to be engaged in what this looks like and for local authorities to act as the leaders and facilitators. There are examples of this in England, in Preston, where there is an ambitious wealth-building strategy. What strategy does the Minister envisage for Wales to harness the benefit of local procurement, land use, community assets, and the variety of anchor institutions that exist throughout Wales, such as housing associations and third sector bodies? Thank you.

I'm very grateful to Altaf Hussain for raising the Preston model—it's something that Welsh Government has been very interested in as we've been developing our own work on the foundational economy. And it's certainly a model that we did explore in terms of those anchor institutions—the role that the NHS has to play, the role that local authorities have to play, higher education institutions. All of those institutions that aren't going anywhere have a really important role to play in terms of the foundational economy work. And that's something that we have learned very much from the Preston model, and also the work from the Centre for Local Economic Strategies. We have, as a result of some of that thinking, supported the NHS in Wales through our foundational economy programme, to embed social value within their contract-award decisions. And in the last financial year, this resulted in over £28 million being won by businesses in Wales. So, we're absolutely using what we learned through the Preston model, but then putting, obviously, our own Welsh stamp and own Welsh emphasis on that.