Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:34 pm on 30 November 2022.
Thank you for confirming what I've actually heard in briefings that have been made available to me and to other Senedd Members of other parties about not just the financial budgetary pressures facing local authorities, but also discussing the reserves. And that figure that you've cited, that if it was all thrown at the current pressures, we might have three months before all those reserves are used up, regardless of the fact that most of it is currently allocated for other uses—. So, can I ask, in your meetings with local authority leaders going forward, particularly Andrew Morgan of Rhondda Cynon Taf and Huw David of Bridgend in my areas, could you ask them, if there were any Members of this Senedd—some of whom are former council leaders—who were unable to attend those briefings, and to see the scale of the pressures that are currently facing our local authorities, to invite them again to sit down with officers in that local authority and just see how far the reserves would go?