Universal Free School Meals

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:03 pm on 29 June 2022.

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Photo of Rebecca Evans Rebecca Evans Labour 2:03, 29 June 2022

I think that this is another one of those areas of pressure on local government that your colleague Sam Rowlands was discussing earlier on in the session today, in the sense that their budget, like ours, is worth less than originally envisaged. The prices of food have increased by 8.7 per cent in the year to May 2022 and obviously there is still a lot of global uncertainty, and we can't be sure that this won't increase further still, so I do think that this is one of the many pressures on local government. That said, I think that local government is in the best possible position it could be, thanks to the good settlement that it did have in our three-year spending review, but obviously we will work closely and keep an eye on this with local government. That said, I think this does speak to that need for the UK Government to provide that general uplift to budgets to reflect the kind of pressure that Peter Fox is talking about in terms of the day-to-day real-life impact of inflation on the delivery of policies, and particularly those that support the most vulnerable in society.