Ms Anna Walsh:

In some cases, yes, but more typically not. That is because the funding decisions tend to be taken on an annual basis at the beginning of the year and that has led to levels of uncertainty. Everybody would welcome more considered and longer-term planning cycles and financial cycles. I appreciate the resources available to local authorities are not necessarily equivalent at this stage but there would need to be an equaliser mechanism, which would be beyond my understanding of how local authorities might work. There would need to be an equaliser factor built in to how those funding decisions could be arrived at.