6. What assessment has the Welsh Government made of the impact of its draft budget for 2023-24 on local authorities? OQ59141

The Government is providing unhypothecated revenue funding of over £5.5 billion and £180 million of capital funding in 2023-24 in support of local authority services. While this is a significantly better settlement than authorities had anticipated, authorities will need to take some difficult decisions given the high levels of inflation.

I'm grateful to the Minister for that answer. I was very engaged and taken by the answer the Minister also gave to Peter Fox in an earlier question. The answer could have been given by a different Minister a decade ago, in reality. Local authorities are suffering from a squeeze in funding, and the people who suffer most are the poorest and the most vulnerable people. And the local authorities that suffer the most are those local authorities least able to sustain additional income through fee income and other commercial income, and those tend to be the poorest parts of the country as well, places like Blaenau Gwent, which I represent. The Welsh Government has a responsibility to those people, and if I'm quite clear, Minister, it's not good enough simply to say, 'It's the fault of the UK Government, we're not doing anything.' Those days are gone. What I want to see from the Welsh Government is real action to ensure that, perhaps, shared services as you've just debated, take a hit, but, more potentially, a reorganisation of local government to put people first, to ensure that we have local authorities capable of delivering the services we ask them to deliver, and partners in ensuring that we can address the real social issues we're facing—social and economic issues we're facing—across Wales. Blaming the Tories was yesterday's game. I believe the Welsh Government's got a responsibility to those people today.

I think the Welsh Government has a responsibility to be honest to people in Wales that it is a fact that our budget is not rising in line with inflation, and I think that's a fact. Nonetheless, Welsh Government is doing absolutely everything that it can in order to prioritise and protect public services, which is why we undertook a very painful exercise across Government to try and reprioritise funding towards local government and towards health services. And it's why we have provided at least the amount of consequential funding that we received in respect of NHS services and local government services to those particular sectors, bearing in mind that we have had to take really tough decisions ourselves. The financial situation we find ourselves in is a fact, it's not an excuse, but I would agree with the point that the Member made that the people who suffer the most in these difficult times are those who are the poorest, and also we have to make sure that our funding settlement to local government and the formula that drives it is one that demonstrates fairness in terms of deprivation and also in terms of sparsity, and I think that those things are important parts of our settlement.