Further round of pandemic business support planned from Welsh Government

Further support for business is set to be announced in the coming weeks, as the First Minister had a political jibe about taking Conservative spending advice.

With certain sectors getting support before Christmas and now during January we asked First Minister Mark Drakeford about future plans as it appears lockdown will be continuing for several weeks yet.

Prior to the hospitality specific lockdown Wrexham.com saw consultation documentation that described the support packages in a worked example as covering six weeks of closure plus a week of shutdown and a week of reopening, so a two month period in all.

With the hospitality closure taking place in early December that would mean the calculated cover for that support will be approaching the end of the coverage period.

We also asked the First Minister about wider support for other sectors, who are impacted but are trying to continue with their business as best as possible, for example office based businesses who are working from home but continue to have a range of overheads as they maintain unusable offices.

The First Minister said, “We are working very actively on a further round of support for businesses in Wales. I hope that we’ll be in a position to say something about that within the next couple of weeks, and before the time frame of the help were currently offering comes to an end.””

The first minister also had a political jibe about taking spending advice from the Conservative party.

It comes after Welsh Secretary Simon Hart apologised after claiming that funding being allocated to the Welsh Government was “new money”, a claim that was echoed locally, and highlighted by the First Minister.

The @GOVUK have taken quick and decisive action giving an additional £227 million to the @WelshGovernment to support businesses 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 https://t.co/cjFPCMDXAU

— Sarah Atherton MP (@AthertonNWales) January 5, 2021

Mr Drakeford said: “We are dependent to significant extent on the flow of funds from the UK Government to us.

“You will have seen last week that the Treasury announced that £227 million pounds was coming to Wales because of help that was being provided to businesses in England only for them to correct that the following day to say that nothing was coming to Wales.

“It was all included in money we’ve had already.”

“We are in continuing conversations with the Treasury about that, among other things, too. Conservative MPs in North Wales made, well, let’s be kind, they misunderstood the position and made a big fuss last week saying that the Welsh Government had a billion pounds that we hadn’t spent.”

“In December we were three quarters the way through the financial year, and we spent three quarters of our budget. We’re up to 80% of our budget, in the second week of January, that billion pounds is what we have for the rest of this financial year. So if we had spent it all before Christmas we would have had literally nothing left.

“So had you been asking me your question about extra support for businesses, I’d had to have say there’s nothing we can do, because we took the advice of conservative MPs in North Wales and spent all the money last year.”

“Now, luckily, we didn’t take their advice. We have money left for this quarter and that what we will be drawing on to provide further support to businesses and to do many other things that we need to do, including supporting the vaccination program, the testing program, the TPP program, and all the other things that we have to keep going.

“So by keeping the money to be able to use it in the last three months, we hope to be in a position to be able to make further announcements on business support.”