Welsh councils have come under pressure to spend more than £500m in reserves to help ease the country through an expected recession. Assembly members on the Senedd's finance committee called on local authorities to spend reserves to ensure that council tax rises next year are kept to a minimum. Welsh finance minister, Andrew Davies, last week revealed that councils held around £580m in reserves – more than those held by the Welsh Government – but £380m was earmarked for projects such as road building. Just £144 was defined as ‘unallocated' – effectively money put aside for a rainy day – yet councils were likely to come under intense pressure to spend that as they approached their budget-setting period. The Welsh LGA recently criticised the assembly's below-inflation 2.8% grant settlement for councils next year, claiming that the deal was likely to affect services. Alun Davies, a member of the assembly's finance committee, said the reserves held by councils ‘blew my socks off'. ‘It is something that we have to discuss with local authorities, whether that level of reserves is acceptable when we have issues with the funding of local services,' he said.