, Finance Committee
Scrutiny of the Welsh Government Draft Budget 2024-25: Evidence session 1
So, this budget for the next financial year addresses the fact that the budget is worth £1.3 billion less as a result of inflation, and we've had to really focus in where our priority areas are. So, we know that the NHS and front-line core public services are…
, Finance Committee
Scrutiny of the Welsh Government Draft Budget 2024-25: Evidence session 1
Yes. So, the efforts that we made over the summer to make the statement that we did in October were to address the fact that our budget was worth £900 million less than at the time it was originally set. So, we needed to undertake some action to reprioritise…
, Finance Committee
Scrutiny of the Welsh Government Draft Budget 2024-25: Evidence session 1
Yes. It's Rebecca Evans, Minister for Finance and Local Government, and I'll ask the team to introduce themselves.
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
Great. Diolch yn fawr.
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
Local authorities could still choose to provide that information in that way if they felt it was the appropriate thing to do.
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
I do definitely understand and have sympathy with the concerns of local newspapers. I think there is a cold question that we have to ask ourselves about the appropriateness of creating a system whereby we would continue with ensuring that people access that…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
So, the proposal is that the information will be provided electronically in future. So, that could be a website, for example. We do know that people's ways of accessing and consuming information has changed since the legislation for local government finance…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
So, we had a good debate about this in the Legislation, Justice and Constitution Committee earlier this week, and it really is about being able to be responsive. So, we've given some examples today about how we needed to respond rapidly in the case of the…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
So, the commitment is set out on the face of the Bill. The reality is that the Welsh Government can review that at any point. So, we could review today the single-person discount under the current legislation that we have. But this Welsh Government has no…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
That's correct, yes.
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
And I'm right, I think, in saying that the Welsh Government has only ever used its powers in relation to discounts to extend discounts to people rather than to remove discounts from them.
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
We've got a full review of the discounts, disregards, exemptions and premiums under way at the moment. So, I think there are more than 50 different categories that we've had a working group looking at, to explore whether or not each of those 50 are fit for…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
So, currently, legislation requires authorities to approve their schemes by 31 January every year for the following financial year. So, as a result, we can only make one statutory instrument in the Welsh Government to incorporate the changes to the…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
I’m just going to give another example, which is that local authorities have discretion over the period of council tax arrears that can be written off as a result of an individual failing to apply for a council tax reduction during a period which they were…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
So, we've had to rely on local authorities using discretion, for example, around supporting households that are hosts to people who are arriving from Ukraine. Local authorities do that, they use their discretion, but creating that kind of national scheme…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
Yes, so, in practice at the moment, the local scheme is almost a legal convenience, or a legal anomaly, in a sense, because we introduced our council tax reduction scheme in 2013-14, and since then we've been providing local authorities with £244 million a…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
The revaluation work, a significant amount of that funding, actually, is required by the Valuation Office Agency in terms of the work that it would be required to do, and, again, maybe Debra can say a bit more about the agreement that we have with the VOA in…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
With putting the five-yearly revaluation cycle into legislation, you would expect that that would be the normal way in which revaluations take place. But I think just having that flexibility to delay or change the date, should it be necessary for specific…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
I don't think that there is anything in this legislation that would enable that consideration. I know we debate quite a lot in the Chamber that wider point about council reserves, and you'll have seen the recent report from Wales Fiscal Analysis, which looks…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
I think what the IFS report was highlighting is that local authorities can, separate to council tax reform, seek to raise council tax in any case, as you know, and they consider it every year afresh, as we consider Welsh rates of income tax and so on. So, I…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
I suppose that would be separate to the legislation in any case. Just to be clear, as I mentioned at the start, there’s a bigger, wider programme, so this is part of that wider programme. We have seen changes in property values vary in different parts across…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
So, I'll bring Ruth in on this one.
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
So, the first approach, which is the approach that is essentially a simple revaluation, bringing everything up to date—that makes the system, as I say, more up to date. What it doesn't make it is more progressive, so you'd need changes between bands, really…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
I think that one of the options was a more proportionate system, so people would pay a proportion of the value of their property as council tax. When you model some of that, it does give you some very, very high levels of council tax at the upper end, which…
, Local Government and Housing Committee
Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill: Evidence from the Minister for Finance and Local Government
So, what we're proposing in the legislation is just to change the name of the mid-reference point. So, at the moment, it's set in legislation that it's band D, but as you've seen in some of the examples that we've got in the consultation document, we end up…
