Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Economy – in the Senedd at 2:03 pm on 16 November 2022.
I will continue to press the case with whoever the latest Ministers are with responsibility for this. The return of Michael Gove to the department of levelling up may mean that we don't have a significant delay in doing so, but it was supposed to be the case that within three months of submitting their plans, local government would then have answers from the UK Government. But actually, it isn't just the last three months, because that approval hasn't been made; it's actually even worse, because despite the fact that the shared prosperity fund was first announced in 2017, the fund has not yet got off the ground: not a penny of funding, not a single penny of funding from the shared prosperity fund has reached Wales, whereas the new EU funding programmes would have started almost two years ago, and money would already be flowing in a multi-year framework where you wouldn't have artificial deadlines for spending within financial years that would almost certainly mean money would be spent poorly at the end of one financial year, and if not, it would be unspent and returned to the UK Treasury. There'd be no top-slice for Multiply; again, another egregious transgression onto devolved responsibilities. The challenge is: is the UK Government prepared to meet even the pledges it has now made; the ones it made when it broke its manifesto promises; the ones that leave us over £1 billion worse off? I sincerely hope we have some clarity on the money coming so that decisions are made, but, more than that, so that the UK Government take the opportunity to walk away from the crazy rules they have imposed that will guarantee poor spending, and I believe it will certainly mean that money will go back to the Treasury, and it's certainly not what the promise of so-called 'levelling up' was meant to deliver.