Part of 3. Questions to the Minister for Economy – in the Senedd at 2:48 pm on 31 January 2023.
I'm very well aware of the pressures on many of our local authorities and public bodies. We have done whatever we can to support both national institutions and the local authorities. The local authorities, as you know, have had the best financial settlement in a long time, and much higher than they had anticipated, and how they utilise that budget is a matter for them. They have their own democratic mandates and they have to make those decisions. I hope that the decisions that they come to, following their deliberations and their consultations, will be that they take things like leisure centres and museums in the whole and that they realise that they are part of the wider well-being agenda for their population. I think you have to look at that in a holistic way rather than on a piece-by-piece basis, but certainly we have provided for individual organisations—libraries, National Museum Wales, the National Library of Wales and so on—additional funding to get them through this immediate crisis, and, as I say, with the local authorities and their increased budgets, I hope that they will be able to do something. But one of the things that I am concerned about, and remain concerned about, is the UK Government's relief scheme that has still excluded swimming pools, for instance, from their proposals, and we do continue to press the UK Government to utilise their powers to support swimming pools, which are probably the hardest hit, and potentially the hardest hit in this process.