Thank you very much for raising that and also giving a really stark picture of the challenges facing local authorities, particularly the ones that you've referred to in north Wales. I've had the opportunity to meet recently with the finance sub-group of the partnership council for Wales, and also with the Welsh Local Government Association executive committee, to talk about budget pressures. We now have a fortnightly series of meetings with local authority leaders, and in those meetings we're able to discuss issues such as budget pressures as well. I really do find those meetings extremely helpful in terms of being able to hear exactly what's happening in local authorities, and the size of the funding gaps that they're identifying. 

I think that this year is extremely challenging, but looking ahead to next year and the year after, I think that those years are the ones probably most keeping leaders up at night at the moment. This is exactly the same challenge that we're facing in terms of the impact of inflation, which is why the UK Government absolutely has to change tack in terms of these threats to cut public services, because, as you suggest, these are jobs, these are services that we all rely on in our communities. Local authorities aren't spending huge amounts of money doing things that don't matter; they're providing education, they're providing social services, they're dealing with waste, and so on.

I think that these messages are really important, and they do need to get back to the UK Government that there needs to be investment in our public services, rather than looking to cut public services at this particular time, with all the implications that that will have for jobs, and then that awful cycle when people lose their jobs and they start to become more dependent on services, and those services themselves are cut, and so on. It's a spiral that we don't want to get ourselves into.