Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:13 pm on 15 February 2023.
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.