Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:38 pm on 28 September 2022.
I'd be more than happy to continue to make these arguments in regard to both the levelling-up fund and the shared prosperity fund to the UK Government. We do have our next meeting of the inter-ministerial standing committee, which is what the quadrilaterals used to be, where all the Ministers for finance from the UK get together, and we've asked specifically for a discussion on replacement European Union funding. The short deadlines are a real concern. Of course, with European funding, you'd have a number of years over which to profile the spend, and the short deadlines for both applications and delivery, I think, are really concerning. Also, the size of the fund is a real worry as well. I know that Caerphilly has bid for more than £66 million of funding from the second round of the levelling-up fund, but the fund itself is only worth £800 million across Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, so it will do very little to level up, and we fear that there may be a good number of disappointed local authorities in terms of the bids that they've put forward. But we will absolutely continue to press the UK Government—I do so with my colleague Vaughan Gething, who leads on this—to have a more timely approach and also just to increase the level of funding that is available through these funds.