I hope you have all managed to get some time away with family and loved ones over the summer.

This week marks two years since I handed in my notice at WalesOnline and went off on my own.

The last 24 months have exceeded my wildest dreams. Every week, this newsletter drops into the inbox of 16,000 people. Totting up the total wordcount across all of the newsletters since we started, we have exceeded 550,000 words. This newsletter is now a team working out of an office rather than just me working out of the boxroom in my house.

Back in May we covered the Welsh elections. As a reporter, you want to cover things that matter, and I believe we played a part in holding politicians to account and enabling the people of Wales to make an informed decision. Thank you to all of you who supported us.

When I left WalesOnline, I always said that after the election I would take stock and assess. What is clear to me is that there is absolutely a space for a newsletter like this and I believe there is a great deal of scope for growth and refining what we do.

But it’s also becoming very obvious to me that there is so much that an overtly “politics” newsletter can’t do.

I am therefore really excited about a new project that is going to try and fill this gap.

So in today’s newsletter I will:

1. Talk you through my plans for this newsletter and ask for your feedback.

2. Announce the new project.

Let’s get into it!

Plans for this newsletter

This time last year I asked you all for feedback, thoughts and ideas about how we could try and make this newsletter better. That resulted in tips for several stories, increased use of graphics and maps as well as a (not always successful) attempt to dial back the odd swear word.

One piece of feedback that several people raised last year was that it would be great if there was the option to “listen” to the newsletter. This would involve me reading out the newsletter and inserting that recording. Although I liked this idea, it’s not always practical because sometimes our newsletters respond to breaking news (and need to be out asap) and/or are written in places that are inconvenient to produce a clean recording, like a train for example. However, we are going to endeavour to add audio for some of our deepdives.

Going forward, now that we are through the election we aim to focus a little bit more on explainer pieces looking at specific issues as well as interviews with political figures while continuing to challenge and fact check politicians. But ultimately, this is your newsletter and we would really appreciate your feedback again. You can do so using this form.

A final thanks to all the people who sponsored and advertised in this newsletter. Especially our longstanding supporter Hello Starling.

If you wish to explore advertising opportunities - get in touch.

The new project

After teasing it for a few weeks, I am really excited to announce a new company I am launching with Catrin Pascoe - The Cymru News Network. The official announcement will be made next week but I wanted newsletter readers to hear about it first.

Cardiff born and Pembrokeshire raised Catrin has been a journalist for 28 years, of which over 25 were in Wales. She was the editor of a daily newspaper for over a decade and actually interviewed me for my first ever journalism job as a trainee for the Western Mail.

Wales is a wonderful nation of communities. We have our own parliament and language but also wrestle with significant challenges.

The issue is we simply don’t have a media ecosystem that reflects the reality of what our country is.

Now don’t get me wrong, Wales has some incredible journalists, as well as some brilliant news organisations.

The problem is, we don’t have enough of them. This creates several serious problems:

• It leaves Wales with local news deserts.

• It makes people vulnerable to fake news and disinformation on social media.

• It perpetuates loneliness and the disintegration of communities.

• This leads to a reduction in hope and aspiration.

• People then disengage with politics as a vehicle for change.

This lack of paid opportunities in turn has serious consequences for aspiring young journalists in Wales:

• Talented reporters see Wales as a stepping stone rather than the destination in their careers.

• Wales therefore loses talent as there is no defined pathway for developing it.

• Too often people from less well off backgrounds are not able to access the profession.

• This in turn means that important stories get missed because newsrooms are not able to be fully reflective of the communities they serve.

Now this begs the question of why Wales hasn’t got a fully developed media ecosystem fitting for a nation? There are of course historical reasons why Wales doesn’t have the depth of traditional titles Scotland has, but more recently it’s the fact that making independent journalism work financially is just really hard.

The growth of the internet has conditioned people to expect that news is free and the decline of print has starved media organisations of advertising revenue. And most importantly in my view, news organisations have generally made themselves super dependent on the algorithms of social media platforms.

Putting a bunch of sociopathic tech bros between journalists and their readers is a horrible model for funding a vital industry.

So we currently have:

• A wonderful country made up of distinct communities which doesn’t have the media landscape it deserves.

• Young reporters who are unable to fulfil their full potential in Wales.

• An industry which has often, for several years, been really struggling to make quality journalism work financially.

Our aim is to try and help tackle these issues.

This is where The Cymru News Network comes in. Its long term aim is to create an overarching news service for Wales.

What’s the plan?

We want to provide thoughtful, intelligent and accessible journalism for the people of Cymru.

But to do this we need it to be sustainable and therefore we are not going to do this from the top down, we are going to do this from the bottom up.

We are going to create bespoke local brands covering specific geographic areas of Wales. At a time when many news organisations are centralising, we are committing to creating new local brands which are located within the communities they serve.

We believe that a Wales specific news service needs to be…well…Welsh in its structure.

And this feels like a very Welsh way to do it. You can’t just have a generic template, Wales is a nation made up of strongly defined communities and our media landscape should be reflective of this. Over the coming months we will be announcing the first projects that sit within The Cymru News Network.

Long term, we want to combine the titles across this network into a broader Welsh news service. It will be owned and based solely within Cymru.

We are also looking to develop a pathway for young journalists through these various titles so they can forge a career in Wales. We aim to give them the space to try things, be creative and hone their fundamental journalism skills. Providing opportunities to young people from deprived backgrounds is one of the principle motivations behind this project.

I think it’s also worth putting in a few disclaimers.

1. This is a different product to this newsletter. Overwhelmingly, my main focus will remain this newsletter. I am a political investigative journalist at heart and it is this newsletter that pays my mortgage. Though I will be involved in helping set up the titles within The Cymru News Network, the day to day running of the organisation will be done by Catrin and, hopefully, the team of reporters we gradually build across Wales.

2. These titles will not be “political”...sort of. The aims of the new titles we are looking to develop will be to offer proper local news services for the areas we cover. While they will cover local government, they are not overtly political in nature. Despite this they will look at how political decisions impact people. They are about reporting on and serving communities. We are looking to do features, profiles, quality food reviews and cultural deep dives. We will explain more about this in the coming months.

3. Our only “stance” is to be pro the communities we represent. Whether that be championing them, fighting for them or highlighting their success and challenges, our only aim is to be on the side of our readers.

4. This is not a slight on other news providers in Wales. I can’t stress this enough. Wales has some fantastic journalists and organisations. The fact there are gaps in how Wales is covered is reflective of a failing model, rather than the people who are striving everyday to report on Cymru. We are looking to supplement what we already have in Wales, not replace it.

5. This will take time. We aim to take Wales seriously. And proper journalism takes time, resources and expertise, especially if you want it to be sustainable. This won’t be a Wales wide news service overnight, precisely because we want it to be built on strong foundations, and not dependent on taxpayers’ money. So if we are not immediately covering where you live, give us time.

How can you help?

If you are a member of the public reading this I am not asking you for anything. If you are already subscribing to this newsletter, you are already personally supporting my journalism and I am very grateful.

So why are we putting this out there now? Well because we are looking to secure long-term corporate partners.

We already have several fantastic organisations on board, but the more support we have, the better we can make our coverage and the quicker we can roll out.

This is the chance for your organisation to get in on the ground floor of something really exciting. Whether that be marketing, advertising, highlighting important issues or something else, if you would like to find out more about how we could work together, please get in touch on: Catrin.Pascoe@newsnetwork.cymru.

Catrin and I are genuinely so excited to do this. It’s going to be a hell of a lot of work but it’s well past time that Wales started telling its own story.

The Will Hayward Newsletter will be out as normal this Wednesday with the midweek briefing.

Diolch yn fawr

Will

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

Hello everyone,

Before we start I want to outline our publication plans for the rest of August.

This will be the last newsletter for a couple of weeks. Over the election period we were averaging four newsletters per week and we are going to take a break over the next fortnight.

However, we will not be just putting our feet up. There is a brand new project that we are in the final stages of putting together and we are using this time to get all our ducks in a row for that.

So the next newsletter will be on Sunday the 30th of August. In that I will be announcing this new project, which I am really excited to talk to you about. It’s ambitious but I think it can build on everything we have all collectively done here.

After that, normal service will resume with the midweek briefing, Sunday deepdives and special reports. The first weekend in September will be our grading of Plaid’s first 100 days in power.

Right, let’s get into the midweek briefing!

Counting the cost of Brexit - millions being spent on something we might never need

If you want a textbook example of how we in Wales are continuing to pay (literally) for Brexit ten years on, take a look at this.

In 2024 the Welsh Government started work on a border post facility near Holyhead port to facilitate checks on live animals and goods from Ireland in line with post-Brexit rules.

The UK Government footed most of the bill, providing £44m of the £51m cost of the site.

The problem is, it has never been used.

Just before it was due to be handed over to the Welsh Gov, the UK and EU announced they would be working towards an agreement aimed at making it cheaper and easier for goods passing between Ireland and the rest of the UK.

This is yet to be agreed but if it is, it’s highly likely that a lot of the checks that were supposed to be carried out at this border post won’t be needed at all.

Recently, an FOI published on the Welsh Government website revealed that £15.6m was spent in 2025/26 on the Holyhead site. Another £53k has been spent on a similar facility in Pembrokeshire. This is Welsh Government money.

We went through older Welsh Government statements and documents and found that as well as the original £7m committed by Welsh ministers, another £6.4m revenue funding was promised in 2024/25.

That’s nearly £30m gone on an empty building that seems unlikely to ever be used for its intended purpose.

We approached the Welsh Government asking what the £15m was spent on last year and they told us it was to prepare the site for completion and operation as a border post or be repurposed as something else if it isn’t needed, as well as on maintenance of the building.

Ten years on from the referendum result, which Plaid claim has cost the Welsh economy £4bn - and which recent polls show most people in Wales now think was a mistake - this is just another “Brexit dividend”.

The Welsh Gov say they remain hopeful of progress on the UK-EU deal so plans for the building can be resolved as soon as possible.

Serious failings at Cardiff and Vale health board

An independent investigation of issues at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board has detailed patient safety concerns, a lack of staff confidence in leadership and a “fear culture” around speaking up about problems.

The assessment was commissioned after the health board was placed at Level 4 last year — the second-highest level of NHS Wales escalation — following concerns about finance, quality, clinical services, governance and leadership.

A report published last week said an “excessive number” of never events (preventable incidents that could compromise patient safety and shouldn’t ever happen) had been recorded over the previous two years, but found inadequate processes to prevent recurrence.

The poor condition of the physical estate was also found to be compromising staff ability to deliver safe care. Assessors heard of four power outages in critical care in 12 months and flooding in the outpatients department.

Most staff interviewed said they lacked confidence in the executive leadership to lead the organisation out of escalation, and some spoke of a “fear culture” in parts of the organisation. Some said they believed internal complainants could be sidelined and were reluctant to raise issues because of negative consequences.

Under level four targeted intervention, the Welsh Government will maintain closer oversight over the health board’s operations.

One senior figure in the health board told this newsletter:

“Making actual changes in C&V is a very big task. It is good that a proper spotlight is now on the situation but look at Betsi - special measures have achieved nothing.”

A clarification

Just a note on last week’s story about Gareth Evans, the Welsh Government’s new Chief Allied Health Professional Officer (CAHPO).

Our understanding was that Mr Evans would be doing this while also keeping his job as a director at Betsi Cadwaladr health board, but we have since been told this is not the case

Reform hypocrisy on climate change

Over the last few weeks wildfires across Wales have been having a devastating impact on wildlife and ecological habitats, as well as on people affected by smoke and air pollution.

At the weekend Reform’s Laura Anne Jones posted on X, where she called the fires “heartbreaking” and wrote the following message:

Now, it is true that wildfires often start because of arson or human actions.

But there is a vital piece of context missing from this post: arson is sadly not an uncommon crime and has happened for many years, but the reason these fires can now spread so easily and quickly is because they feed off dry land.

Wales has just had its driest July since records began. There have been numerous messages from stretched fire crews about the challenges they have faced because of the hot and dry weather. On Tuesday afternoon, the Met Office said the UK is set for its hottest summer on record.

It is an irrefutable fact that this is caused by manmade decisions that are heating our planet.

Ms Jones calls the fires “heartbreaking”, yet her party actively promotes climate denial and repeatedly calls to scrap Net Zero. Her party colleagues appear to see these heatwaves we have experienced as a ‘normal British summer’.

Here is Ms Jones in the Senedd back in March calling to “end these ridiculous net-zero targets that are bringing our Welsh economy to our knees.”

More action is needed on holiday homes

A new study suggests the Welsh Government is not doing enough to clamp down on holiday accommodation despite our housing crisis.

A new report by the Bevan Foundation called ‘Homes or Holidays?’ made the following estimation which, when you stop and think about it, is a shocking state of affairs:

The report, published in partnership with Shelter Cymru, suggests the problem is becoming more Wales-wide, not just in tourist hotspots like Gwynedd and Pembrokeshire. It says the number of holiday lets in Wales actually rose about 10% from 2022 to 2026, equivalent to about 1,345 additional homes.

While it praised the Welsh Government for measures like raising Land Transaction Tax (the Welsh equivalent of stamp duty) and allowing councils to charge premiums to second home owners, it said these had not done enough to curb the rise of holiday homes and made a number of recommendations to:

• introduce a national requirement for planning permission for change of use from a permanent home to holiday accommodation

• increase the higher rate of Land Transaction Tax by 2%

• reconsider the 182-day business-rates rule (in last week’s newsletter we wrote that the Welsh Government are already looking at this)

• ring-fence money made from council tax premiums on second homes to be spent on housing

‘It wasn’t me’

Reform politicians have been scrambling to distance themselves from an online post about a Plaid MS’ late husband.

Housing minister Siân Gwenllian recently gave an interview to WalesOnline where she spoke about her experience raising her four young children after her husband Dafydd died from cancer in 1999.

The BBC reports that a post appearing to be from the Reform Brycheiniog Tawe Nedd branch account on Facebook accused Ms Gwenllian of using her experience as a “card for political gain” before later deleting the comment.

The post was criticised by Reform’s MSs in the constituency, who have all distanced themselves from the account. James Evans called it “totally unacceptable” while his colleagues Iain McIntosh and David Mills have also said they are not behind the post.

A Reform UK spokesperson told the BBC:

“This is not a London HQ or Senedd Group office account.”

Farage’s face-off with a bin

Not Wales-specific, but all eyes will be on Clacton tomorrow as Nigel Farage takes on Count Binface.

34 candidates are running in the by-election nobody asked for, which is actually a record for any UK parliamentary by-election. The previous record was the 2008 vote in Haltemprice and Howden when Tory MP David Davis suddenly resigned his seat to re-run.

The other Westminster parties have opted not to contest, mostly in protest over what they consider to be an attempt from Reform’s leader to divert attention from scrutiny over his finances.

We wrote previously that either a Farage loss (which remains, in my view, very unlikely) or a less than emphatic win could have ripple effects for Reform in Wales.

We won’t know the result until Friday, but what we can say is that standing on the stage proclaiming victory over a man dressed as a bin is unlikely to be the two fingers to the “establishment” the Architect of Brexit hoped for.

Huge rise in complaints to ombudsman

Complaints about public services to the Ombudsman of Wales have risen by nearly 50% compared to this time last year.

The Public Services Ombudsman for Wales said it received 1,130 new complaints about public services between April and June this year - a 48% increase compared to the same period last year.

The ombudsman, which will next lay its annual report before the Senedd, said complaints relating to members of public bodies breaking the code of conduct had risen 18% compared with this time last year.

Among its findings were that man died of a morphine overdose two days after he was mistakenly prescribed it while being discharged from Wrexham Maelor Hospital, which Betsi health board apologised for earlier this summer, and that a Cardiff councillor who was charged with a criminal offence related to a public protest had breached the code of conduct.

Welsh Government approves its first offshore wind farm

The new Plaid government have approved their first floating offshore wind project in the Celtic Sea.

Ministers have granted permission for the construction of Llŷr Wind Farm 35km off the coast of Pembrokeshire. The project, which is being developed by Cierco Energy, will include two sites with a total capacity of 200 MW and is expected to create 2,000 jobs during construction.

It received a marine licence by NRW last month and has also secured seabed rights from the Crown Estate, with an aim to begin generating power in 2031.

The winners and losers in Wales’ summer of by-elections

It might seem well in the rearview mirror, but May’s Senedd election triggered a host of by-elections across Wales.

19 out of the 96 MSs elected in May were sitting councillors in Wales, so by-elections have been taking place across the summer in 14 of Wales’ 22 council areas to replace them.

Last week, Caerphilly held a vote to replace Plaid’s Donna Cushing. Plaid held the seat with their candidate Anthony Cook.

All by-elections have been completed. Here’s how each of the political parties fared:

• Plaid: 8 seats held, 1 gain, 2 lost

• Reform: 4 seats held, 4 lost

• Welsh Labour: 1 hold, 1 gain

• Conservatives: 1 gain

• Lib Dems: 1 gain

• Greens: None

• Independents: 2 gains

All in all Plaid had a pretty good time, although they lost two council seats to independent candidates. Reform will have to put this down as a disappointment, having held onto only half of the seats vacated by their now Senedd MSs.

Single council seat by-elections are not always a great barometer for the wider mood. The numbers of people voting is usually very low while local issues and personalities can play a large part in the result.

Plaid’s plan for culture and sport

The Welsh Government have published the first details of their plan to reform culture and sport in Wales.

As we have written about before, investment in culture in Wales is something previous Welsh Governments have seriously overlooked. Cultural spending per head in Wales is one of the lowest in Europe.

When we interviewed Heledd Fychan earlier this year she said Plaid were specifically committing to increase culture spending each year.

Ms Fychan was at the Eisteddfod last week where a discussion was held as part of Plaid’s proposals for a new ten-year culture and sport strategy “based on real actions to turn the vision of Wales as a culture and sport powerhouse into reality.”

A Call for Evidence asking for people to contribute to the strategy will run until December 18^th and you can find it here.

New report explores link between motherhood and poverty

A new report has called for more action on gender inequality to tackle poverty in Wales.

The report, commissioned by Public Health Wales and carried out by Liverpool John Moores University, says women who become parents face additional challenges compared to their male counterparts including high childcare costs, limited state support in the early years, and unequal take up of parental leave.

As well as men who become fathers being more economically insulated, the report also found women are overrepresented in part time, low paid and insecure roles. The authors called for more action on gender equality, including investment in childcare and early years provision, secure work and adequate parental leave.

Wales Office rapped over now-deleted post

The Wales Office has been criticised for wrongly claiming defence spending in the UK was increasing.

The UK Statistics Authority said a post on X by the Wales Office referenced the UK Government “increasing defence spending by £270bn over this Parliament.”

However, the arms-length government body said this was not correct and that the £270m figure actually represented the total sum promised by Westminster between 2025 and 2029, rather than any increase. The original Wales Office post was later deleted.

The authority said similar claims were also made by then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the House of Commons as well as by the MoD implying the £270m was extra money.

A letter from Penny Young, Interim Chair at the UK Statistics Authority, said the Wales Office acknowledged that the figure used was a mistake and had been amended.

Book event

Finally, a quick date for your diary - I will be taking part in an event at Mumbles Tabernacle on Wednesday, September 16th at 6.30pm. I will be in conversation with former Welsh Government minister Andrew Davies about my book.

To find out more or grab a ticket click here.

That’s all for today. We will be back in two weeks with the big announcement.

Take care,

Will and Ryan

Subscribe now

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

The themes that come up time and again both in this newsletter and in my book are:

• Wales is stuck in a perpetual holding pattern of low productivity and substandard infrastructure

• The funding of Wales is set up in such a way that the above point is inevitable

• Large amounts of public money seem to disappear into black holes with limited returns

• Rather than tackle problems, for too long governments both in Cardiff Bay and Westminster have patched holes and put on sticking plasters

I am writing this from the Llangwm Literary Festival in Pembs/Sir Benfro. As I was prepping for a talk I was giving about the book, I was again shocked at how many times the above themes came up time and again when talking about Wales and how it is run.

In today’s newsletter we are going to examine a vital piece of Welsh infrastructure - a bridge.

Though it is just one bridge, in one part of Cymru, it embodies all of these themes.

We have gone into how over £350m of public money has been poured into a private company and how this is inexplicably both a terrible waste of scarce resources in the long term but also apparently the best deal on the table?!

Ryan O’Neill put this piece together speaking to local people and Welsh Government insiders while also trawling through company accounts. I hope you enjoy reading it (and it doesn’t make you too angry on a sunny Sunday morning).

The reason I am so proud to be sponsored by Hello Starling is that they are superb at what they do.

As media planning and buying specialists, they are experts at getting your product/message/campaign in front of people you want to reach. I know first hand how good they are. They have been instrumental in helping the newsletter grow.

Find out how they can help you here.

‘Is this a joke?’ - The saga of a bridge

Reporting by Ryan O’Neill

On Saturday, the Menai Suspension Bridge, one of the busiest roads in north Wales, was closed for several hours.

Not because something had happened. It was so people could celebrate its 200th anniversary, which included a procession along the bridge, a vintage rally, live music, pop-up food and drink and guided walking tours.

You may have driven on this bridge if you’ve ever been to Anglesey or gone to/from Holyhead.

If you are familiar with it, you’ll know that shutting it on a busy Saturday is less of a celebration and more of a fitting tribute to what the bridge has become in the last few years.

Here are a few of the online comments when the announcement went out this week:

• “Is this a joke?”

• “Are you serious? Is it an April Fool’s?”

• “A Saturday during August!”

• “Who doesn’t like a day off on their birthday.”

The bridge is an incredibly important piece of infrastructure. 13,000 people use it every day, the equivalent to about one in five out of Anglesey’s population of 70,000.

Not only is it crucial for them, but also for those who work on the island and the thousands of hauliers going to and from Holyhead, which is the second busiest passenger ferry port in the UK.

In simple terms, it is an inescapably vital bridge for both local people and the wider UK economy.

But since 2022, when it was shut for a period because of serious safety concerns, it has been the cause of frequent disruption, unreliability and frustration, for which millions is being paid from the public purse.

The situation has become so bad that this week the Welsh Government held an emergency meeting with everyone involved.

There’s quite a bit to this, so let’s get into it.

What is going on with the Menai Bridge?

If you live or work on Ynys Mon, you likely rely on good connectivity with the mainland. There are two routes, the Menai Bridge and the Britannia. Between them they accommodate around 50,000 vehicles a day on average.

This isn’t small. As a comparison, around 80,000 people use the two Severn bridges each day.

For most of its 200 year life, the Menai Bridge did not have many issues, other than some closures for work here and there.

In October 2022, the Welsh Government suddenly put out a statement saying the bridge would be closed until further notice after engineers raised serious concerns about the brittleness of the steel hangers that could cause them to fail in very specific circumstances.

These parts are incredibly old. When parts of the bridge need replacing they often need to be made specially.

There was only a few minutes’ notice of the 2022 closure. Many people had no idea until they left work. It wasn’t until the following February it reopened, but that was far from the end of the problems.

By the time it shut, the bridge was subject to a 7.5 tonne weight limit for vehicles, which remains in place.

But how is this enforced?

Well, a person in high-vis and a hard hat is stationed at either end of the bridge who use traffic lights to stop vehicles they suspect are overweight.

If the driver says they are under the weight limit, the operative uses their phones to ascertain the weight but, and this is crucial, they have no legal power to stop vehicles.

There are cameras, but these are checked after the fact which does nothing to stop heavy loads using the bridge.

Every time a vehicle over the weight limits crosses, the bridge is closed to check for damage and all traffic is diverted onto the Britannia Bridge.

Here is the current setup as of the past week:

The bridge is managed by a private company called UK Highways A55 Ltd on behalf of the Welsh Government (we’ll get to that).

We contacted them and they told us the original reason for the limit was to allow work to strengthen the bridge’s crossbeams. Since then, an AeroTruss has been installed, which is basically a giant scaffold hanging off the bridge that stores all the equipment for ongoing maintenance.

They pointed us to the Welsh Government website which explains that the scaffolding and equipment weigh 42 tonnes, and the weight limit is “to minimise the load on certain points of the bridge.” It will remain in effect until after the next phase of work is done, which is currently April 2027.

This is causing havoc. A quick Google will tell you that the weight limit is being ignored a lot, triggering regular closures.

A few weeks ago a driver used the bridge after saying their vehicle was 6.8t. It later transpired it was 15t, over double the limit.

By midday, when freight traffic starts picking up, it is not uncommon to see eastbound traffic trailing back on the Britannia Bridge.

In May, a resident posted on a local Menai Facebook group that by the time they went to take their mother to an afternoon hospital appointment on the mainland, the Menai Bridge had been shut twice that day, meaning they had to cancel it for a second time. On that occasion, the bridge was shut THREE TIMES in 24 hours.

This happened at the same time the Urdd Eisteddfod was happening on Anglesey, reportedly causing long tailbacks for people trying to get there.

We hear politicians regularly decrying a lack of productivity and GDP in Wales but how can we function when the major arteries of our transport network are routinely closed without notice?

Abuse to staff

Such is the scale of the problem that in the past week the operatives on the bridge were temporarily taken off duty because they were apparently getting abused, which the company says has become “commonplace.”

Obviously, nobody should be harassed just for doing their job. But we need to ask why this is the system of enforcing what is clearly dangerous for the bridge when it doesn’t work? If operatives are needed because the bridge is dangerous, why are they being removed? Is there a better system?

When we asked UK Highways A55 Ltd, they told us they have looked into other options like metal height barriers but that this was found to be unfeasible after assessments.

In the meantime, they are enforcing this supposedly crucial safety rule using people in hard hats and hi-vis.

After the May incident, the Welsh Government said its officials would increase their presence and people who transgressed would be reported to North Wales Police.

We asked the force how many prosecutions there have been but they didn’t respond…

What are we paying for?

It is worth explaining how the bridge is funded, because it isn’t straightforward.

Roads are, in the main, devolved, which means responsibility normally lies with the Welsh Government. But the Menai Bridge is actually operated by UK Highways A55 Ltd, a private company, as part of a private finance initiative (PFI) contract signed in 1998 (pre-devolution).

Essentially the Welsh Government contracts this company to look after 9km of local trunk road, including the two Menai Strait road bridges connecting Anglesey with the North Wales mainland. In return they receive annual payments known as ‘shadow tolls’ which are based partly on how many vehicles use the network.

The company is responsible for pretty much all aspects of the bridge including inspections, maintenance and engineering.

It has done pretty well out of this deal. Here are the headline figures:

• As of 2025, since 1998 the taxpayer had paid the company £350m to maintain the bridges and other infrastructure.

• By the time the 30-year contract expires in December 2028, the total bill to the taxpayer is likely to exceed £400m.

• Incidentally, £400m was about the estimated cost of building a third bridge in 2022 (in 2017 it was just £135 million).

• Over just the last 10 years, according to their accounts, the company has made £35.67m in profits and paid shareholders £16.12m in dividends.

• Analysis by the excellent Andrew Forgrave found that the company’s most profitable year was 2017-18 (a year before potential issues with parts of the bridge were flagged by engineers), when the company made an operating profit of nearly £11m, having spent just £345,000 on major maintenance.

We had a look at the last 10 years of accounts and between 2016 and 2025, the Welsh Government paid UK Highways Ltd £173.5m, an average of about £17m per year.

While the Welsh Gov were paying £173.5m, the company accounts for UK Highways Ltd show that in the last ten years about £40m was spent on maintenance, which the company told us includes the Menai Bridge. On average that is about £4m a year.

In 2023, the year after the bridge was shut, specific maintenance spending on Menai started appearing in the company’s accounts. In 2023 it amounted to £7.1m, followed by £1.2m in 2024 and £528,000 last year.

All of this is delivered through Private Finance Initiative or PFI.

PFI are projects which see private developers paid money over an extended period for capital projects they have funded and delivered. While it is good for public bodies initially because they get their road/hospital/school for very little upfront cash, in the long run they end up paying far more than if they had paid up front.

Since devolution came in, PFI has been a way for the Welsh Government to borrow off the books, because their borrowing capacity is incredibly small.

Without getting too far down this rabbithole of Blair-era legacy of PFI, it was responsible for some bad deals where governments ended up paying more money than if they had just done the project themselves.

Given Wales’ limited borrowing powers - which we have covered in-depth previously - often it hasn’t been feasible to borrow the money directly for infrastructure projects. Remember, Wales has less borrowing powers than a council.

What can we do about this?

A former Welsh Government insider indicated to us that the Welsh Government actually looked into leaving its PFI contracts after Covid but were ultimately advised they would not be able to negotiate a worthwhile deal.

So money is being spent to maintain a very old, very expensive bridge through a 30-year contract that the Welsh Government inherited, which runs until December 2028, from pre-devolution time.

The most frustrating thing about the whole situation is that tens of millions of pounds is being spent and for years nobody seems to have found a way to minimise the disruption to people’s lives.

This begs the question of what the Welsh Government is doing to hold the company’s feet to the fire?

Read more

Hello everyone,

We are back with you with another summer midweek briefing.

The Senedd is in recess but there is still plenty to explore.

We take look at whether building all these new data centres is actually good for Wales, potential changes to universities in Cymru and illegal fires being started.

Wind creates more electricity than gas for a whole year

Last month marked the first consecutive twelve month period where wind generated more electricity than gas in the UK every month.

This data comes from the energy think tank Ember.

Scotland generates just over a quarter (26.56%) to the UK’s total renewable electricity.

Wales by contrast is just 5.35%.

Wales could become Britain’s AI engine – but will we feel the benefit?

The UK Government sees Wales as a major area where it could increase data centre capacity in the coming years.

Two of the UK’s five designated AI Growth Zones (AIGZ) are in Wales (one in north Wales and the other in south Wales) with huge new facilities are planned across Newport, Cardiff, Bridgend and Anglesey.

But a new report from Senedd Research examines the policy choice Wales now faces, balancing the economic and strategic benefits against demands on electricity, water, land and communities. You can read their full report here.

A report from Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) recently suggested the UK Government is not estimating job creation accurately enough. Some evidence from the US indicates that while data centres do create local jobs, industry advocates can exaggerate the numbers.

Next, Senedd Research raises questions around impacts on electricity demand, water consumption and grid capacity.

Wales had around 154MW of data centre capacity in 2024, but planned data centre developments could increase this dramatically. The South Wales AIGZ alone could exceed 1GW of capacity by the early 2030s according to the UK Government - equivalent to around 13% of Wales’ total electricity generation capacity in 2024.

The proposed Cardiff East data centre would require around 150MW, which is roughly equivalent to all of Wales’ solar electricity generation in 2024.

But finding enough electricity is only part of the problem. Getting that electricity to the data centres could also prove another major constraint.

Senedd Research says the grid network is already under pressure and could require considerable reinforcement to accommodate future growth. Across Britain, there were around 173 requests from new data centres to connect more than 100GW of demand to the grid in May this year and Ofgem has warned this is “far beyond forecast future need and what the system can reasonably support”.

AI data centres also require huge amounts of water to cool systems. But as this year’s drought demonstrates, Wales doesn’t necessarily always have room within its current resources to accommodate another major user.

Welsh Gov opens door to university reforms – but there’s no new money

A review of the higher education sector in Wales could consider a fundamental reform of how universities are funded, governed, and structured.

Universities in Wales are facing a well-publicised crisis in funding, with the countries’ institutions collectively £97m in operating deficit. You can read our special report on Wales’ broken university funding system here.

The Welsh Government itself has said Wales “needs a national response to this critical national challenge.”

This week, it published the terms of reference of an eagerly anticipated independent review of the sector.

The panel’s remit is very broad. Among the key issues they will examine are:

• Changes to student loans, grants for tuition fees and living costs, and grants given to universities.

• The “appropriate structure, organisation, and governance” of the higher education sector. That wording would allow the panel to consider complete or partial university mergers.

• The “movement of Welsh students outside of Wales”. This could mean incentives to keep Welsh students studying in this country rather than travelling elsewhere in the UK.

• The “funding and delivery of alternative pathways through higher education”. This could mean expanding part-time spaces, offering higher education degrees in colleges, or expansion of apprenticeships.

Crucially, recommendations affecting the Welsh Government’s non-ringfenced day-to-day spending on higher education must be “fiscally neutral”. So they can’t recommend a larger funding settlement – the panel instead have to consider how current budgets could be spent differently.

The panel will be appointed in September, with the first phase of the report due in the summer of 2027. The final report is due winter 2027/28.

Its recommendations won’t be binding at all. Ministers can accept, modify or reject them as policy.

But the Welsh Government says it intends to make changes to student-support policy in time for the 2028/29 academic year, informed by the review.

Higher education in Wales hasn’t massively diverged from England since devolution. Despite having the power to do so for a quarter of a century, no Welsh Government has, so far, truly grasped the nettle to reshape the sector to fit Wales’ needs.

Betsi director appointed in long-vacant £80k role

The Welsh Government has finally filled a senior health role that has been vacant for more than a year.

Gareth Evans, a podiatrist who is currently Integrated Health Community Director at Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board, has been named Chief Allied Health Professional Officer (CAHPO).

The role has been vacant since June 2025 after the previous holder retired. The Welsh Government later advertised it with a salary of between £73,978 and £84,882, but could not find anyone.

It led to hundreds of health workers writing to Eluned Morgan over ministers’ failure to fill the role and criticism from the Allied Health Professionals Federation

The job was eventually re-advertised in March, this time with a salary of £76,715 to £88,023. Mr Evans will start in August.

Illegal grassland burning compounding wildfire risk

A report published by Wild Cymru’s Nature Investigations Unit suggests that Wales may have a poorly monitored problem with illegal grassland burning, which could be making our wildfire risk worse.

Wales has the highest rate of wildfires per unit area in the UK, with south Wales the highest density, according to Stefan Doerr, Professor of Geography at the Wildfire Research Centre at Swansea University.

In Wales, farmers are permitted to burn heather, rough grass, bracken, gorse and vaccinium (a type of shrub) under controlled circumstances between October and March in upland areas, and November and March for other areas. This can help improve grazing, manage certain plants, and remove flammable vegetation to reduce wildfire risk in warmer months.

Wild Cymru claims there is evidence to indicate there is illegal grassland burning taking place in mid and west Wales during April and May, the time of year when fires can do the most damage to wildlife.

In 2025, Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service received 2,117 notifications of controlled burns between April and September — outside the normal permitted burning season — compared with 1,742 during the permitted months. These figures include instances of other controlled fires like domestic bonfires, so it doesn’t show exactly how many were illegal grassland burns. However, Wild Cymru says this indicates some illegal burning may be occurring.

It says the current law is “not fit for purpose” and calls for an overhaul including better monitoring, compulsory training and a ban on burning over peat.

Firefighters and Natural Resources Wales teams have continued to battle wildfires this week, with a major incident declared in Rhondda Cynon Taf. Multiple crews have been fighting fires in the area, with firefighters in attendance at a blaze at Llanwonno mountain in Ferndale since Saturday.

The Met Office says Wales has provisionally recorded its driest July on record this year and its joint warmest for average temperatures.

The country saw 9.3mm of rainfall for the month – just 9% of its long-term meteorological average and less than half of the previous record of 22.6mm set in 1911.

Is a rule change on holiday homes on the way?

The Welsh Government have launched a review which could see rules on holiday homes relaxed for some property owners.

In 2023 new rules were introduced meaning owners of self-catering accommodation have to have their property let for at least 182 days a year in order to qualify for business rates. If they don’t, they can be classed as second homes and subject to huge second home premiums. For example, in Gwynedd second home owners pay the normal council tax rate plus 150%.

This was introduced to stop second home owners simply declaring their property was a “business” to avoid council tax.

The policy has received backlash from property owners in Welsh tourist hotspots, who say the threshold is too high (in England, properties only have to be let for 70 days a year to be exempt).

Plaid’s manifesto committed to revisiting the rule and a consultation has now been launched asking people’s views on “what impact a modest reduction might have.”

It also invites views on possible exemptions, like properties which are part of a wider business or those which are on the owner’s farm. You can find it here.

Council refuses to say how much of gig cash will go to grassroots venues

You may remember back in January when we wrote about the influence of Live Nation on Wales’ music industry and how the company was potentially stifling the land of song.

At the time Cardiff Council were eager to tell us that grassroots venues would directly benefit from the income generated by the Blackweir Live series (run by a Live Nation subsidiary) in Bute Park but refused to tell us how much when we asked.

We submitted a Freedom of Information request but despite multiple requests we still have not received a response more than 120 working days later.

With this year’s Blackweir series now done and dusted, we approached the council this week asking how much money had been made and whether they planned to give any to grassroots venues as previously indicated.

They responded that their position was “the same as it was last year” and pointed us to a previously issued public statement saying the shows, which this year featured The Cure, Lewis Capaldi and Pitbull, “will provide vital income to enable the Council to continue investing in the city’s parks and maintaining the high standards in our green spaces that residents deserve”.

It said the money will also help “continue delivering on our music city ambitions, supporting our grassroots venues and promoting the city as a music destination.”

We asked the council how much this would be but they did not provide any figures.

Part of the justification for the events (which limits public access to a park adjacent to one of Wales’ poorest areas) was that some of the money will going directly to grassroots venues. Yet when pressed, they council can’t even say how much money it has generated for grassroots music.

Cynics might argue that it was just lip service to avoid criticism…

Firm behind Welsh quarry flooding was fined £300k after a previous incident

The company operating the quarry at the centre of devastating flooding outside Cardiff was previously fined £300,000 after an incident at another Welsh quarry.

Breedon Trading Ltd operates Taffs Well Quarry in the north of Cardiff.

Last week, the community of Gwaelod-y-Garth flooded just minutes after a “planned blast” at the site, with a substantial torrent of floodwater and silt rushing into a dozen homes. A clean up operation is currently underway and an investigation is being led by the Health and Safety Executive (SE) and South Wales Police.

The company was previously prosecuted for a breach of the Health and Safety At Work Act 1974, following another blast-related incident at Cwt-y-Bugail Quarry in Gwynedd in 2020.

Llandudno Magistrates’ Court heard that on January 15, 2020, a blast at the site sent rocks flying into site buildings and 270m beyond the exclusion zone. One rock punctured the roof of an occupied work shed and another hole was punched in the outside pane an office skylight.

Breedon Trading Ltd of Derby pleaded guilty to safety breaches and was fined £300,000 and ordered to pay £2,534.80 in costs.

There is no suggestion the circumstances of the 2020 incident were the same as those currently under investigation at Taffs Well.

The incident comes just 15 months after planning permission was approved by Cardiff Council to deepen the quarry at Taffs Well.

The permission allowed Breedon to dig 36 metres deeper, taking the quarry floor from around 30 metres above sea level to six metres below it. That allowed the extraction of another three million tonnes of limestone.

The proposal underwent hydrogeological and flood-risk assessment. NRW initially sought further information but ultimately raised no objection.

A spokesperson for Breedon said:

“We are working with the relevant authorities as part of their investigations, and it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

If you have been affected by the flooding at Taffs Well Quarry or would like to get in touch with us about it, please contact marcus@willhayward.co.uk.

An update on Plaid’s childcare offer

The Welsh Government have confirmed all Welsh councils are on track to offer 12.5 hours of funded childcare a week to all two-year-olds by next March.

Deputy First Minister Sioned Williams said the first phase of the government’s expanded childcare offer will be completed by all councils by the end of the financial year with additional funding that has been pledged.

It is the first stage of Plaid’s plan for expanding support to parents of children aged nine months to two years. The next stage will be to increase support for two-year-olds to 20 funded hours a week for 48 weeks, and work with childcare providers to extend the expanded offer to all three- and four-year-olds.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back with you this weekend!

Take care,

The newsletter team

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Hello,

This week we are looking at something Reform and Plaid voters have in common and what that tells us about our politics.

We also approached some Reform MSs to see if they stand by some misleading posts…

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What Plaid and Reform voters have in common

One of the great things about the newsletter format for journalism is that it provides the space to be able to look beneath the headlines at what is really going on.

This can often lead to conclusions which go against the prevailing narrative. Political discourse in Wales and the wider UK can often have a bit of group-think when it comes to what we all believe is going on and why.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating for self-styled “disruptors” who argue they are “shaking up the status quo” by simply saying things that are unfounded and reprehensible.

Indeed, I have literally never met someone who willingly calls themselves a “disruptor” that isn’t also a total bellend. More often than not, they are self-serving, scientifically illiterate, gravytrain-riding cultural vandals.

But this doesn’t mean that we don’t need to really aggressively interrogate assumptions we are making about what is going on in Wales and how we fix it.

One narrative that has been put out a lot, especially in the run up to the Senedd Election, is that Wales is a bitterly divided place. The two biggest parties in the Senedd - Plaid and Reform - are polar opposites when it comes to world view, ideology and identity. It follows that this means that the people who voted for them are diametrically opposed as well.

This is something that I myself have argued because anyone with eyes, ears and a social media account can see that different parts of our society are interpreting our country, and the challenges within it, in very different ways.

But when we dig into the data and the evidence, we can see that it is more complicated than that. Because although voters for Plaid and Reform are generally voting for different things, much of what underpins their votes is the same.

What Plaid and Reform voters have in common - what do the numbers say?

This data comes from analysis by Dr Jac Larner at Cardiff University for the Bevan Foundation, using YouGov data from the last Welsh election. More specifically, they wanted to look at the relationship between economic insecurity and how people voted.

It found that Plaid, Reform and Green voters were the most economically insecure across virtually all measures; overall security, income, housing, debt, emergency resilience (i.e. what you can afford to do if your boiler breaks or car stops working) and old-age confidence (what happens when you retire).

The analysis found that Plaid Cymru and Reform UK voters report almost identical levels of economic worry.

It said:

“This suggests that economic precariousness functions as a common wellspring from which very different political destinations can emerge, possibly with the direction of travel determined by national identity and related values rather than the level of economic anxiety itself.”

So many Reform and Plaid voters (at the last election) were feeling serious pressures on their bank balances, felt very financially insecure and were, understandably, keen for change. But while the roots of their discontent were the same, the perceived solution to this was different.

This idea that ultimately Reform and Plaid voters face the same problems is really important to bear in mind when thinking about Wales. If you start looking at politics from the point of view of “oh, Reform voters are voting that way because they hate foreigners” or “Plaid voters are voting that way because they are separatists that want to break up the UK” then you miss the fundamental point:

The positive thing for policy makers is that, when you scratch below the surface, people across the political spectrum have the same problem. The challenge is that there are big disagreements about what caused those problems and how you deal with them.

Clearly, questions around how you create a functioning and fair Welsh economy are at the root of much of these problems. We haven’t forgotten we promised you a special report on this. We are currently working through the now 200+ messages we got on the topic.

The big differences between Reform and Plaid voters - political efficacy

Political efficacy is basically the trust people have in their ability to understand politics, influence government actions, and bring about social change. It’s how empowered they feel in the system.

According to the research, this is where Reform and Plaid voters are markedly different - 49% of Plaid voters show low efficacy, compared with 80% of Reform voters.

On this, the analysis said:

“We interpret this not simply as a story about insecurity producing alienation but whether voters have an institution they trust to act on their behalf.

Plaid’s electorate is strongly pro-devolution and relatively satisfied with Welsh democracy. Reform’s electorate is the mirror image: 70% want fewer Senedd powers or abolition, and 74% are dissatisfied with democracy in Wales.

“The same pattern holds for national identity: Plaid voters skew strongly Welsh-identifying but have weak British identity, Reform voters more British-identifying or evenly split.”

For both parties, the higher your economic worry, the more likely you are to have low efficacy. However average level of efficacy among Plaid voters was much higher.

The report concludes:

“This is best explained by whether voters see a credible political vehicle for their grievances. Plaid voters can channel economic anxiety into a national/devolution project they believe in; Reform voters carry comparable anxiety but have lost faith in the Senedd, and are similarly hostile to UK-level democracy.

“The efficacy gap, in other words, looks less like a difference in how insecure these voters feel, and more like a difference in whether they believe anyone in government is listening.”

If this is all confusing, think about it like this. You have two teenage siblings growing up in poverty. They live in the same house, eat the same food and suffer the same lack of opportunities. They both can legitimately say that life is really tough.

But one sibling still believes in the system. They believe that school is a vehicle for improving their lives, they attend and engage, whereas the other is the opposite. They see school as “not for them” and either don’t turn up, or if they do, they disrupt it.

What the Welsh Government needs to do is prove to that student/disillusioned voter, that Welsh democracy is a credible vehicle for advancing their interests. Therefore the way to win over Reform voters is simple - make their lives demonstrably better.

Ending the small state myth

One other nugget in the analysis that I thought was particularly interesting was the fact the data unequivocally shows that people who are financially insecure are NOT opposed to state interventions.

It concludes:

The data flatly contradicts the assumption that insecure voters are hostile to the state.

In Wales, insecurity breeds pro-welfare sentiment: insecure adults want substantially more spending on pensions, disability benefits, and unemployment support, and less on defence.

Any political strategy premised on the opposite assumption misreads this electorate profoundly.

This is a line Reform have tried to toe with varying success. On the one hand, their politicians are often deeply hostile to the state in any form and talk ad nauseum about the “nanny state.” At the same time, they have large authoritarian tendencies and their votes broadly support of public services and, for want of a better phrase, big government.

Other key takeaways

The report also found:

• 43% of Welsh adults are ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ worried about their family’s economic security.

• One in four could not absorb a £200 unexpected expense without hardship with 49% lacking confidence in their retirement standard of living.

• Economic insecurity peaks at age 40–45 and is 26 percentage points higher among those with low political efficacy than those without.

Dr Steffan Evans, CEO at the Bevan Foundation said:

“With nearly half the population faced with economic insecurity, getting to grips with the issue should be a priority for all political parties in Wales.

“Some of the policies outlined by the new Welsh government, from expanded childcare to the Cynnal child payment pilot to greater investment in social housing, will make a difference to people’s lives. It is therefore vital that these are implemented as effectively and swiftly as possible.”

Do Reform MSs stand by their posts?

We will finish today by highlighting some of the misleading/incorrect posts from some of our Senedd Members (it’s so annoying when journalists do that).

Read more

Hello everyone,

Wales is facing its fourth heatwave of the year. We hope everyone is keeping themselves safe.

Also, thank you for all the feedback on Sunday’s piece.

In this midweek update we have another report detailing severe problems at Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, Reform MSs taking a trip to Clacton to show support for the boss and a Plaid MS taking an unusual stance on transport investment in his own constituency.

Betsi’s grim annual report

Betsi Cadwaladr health board has published its annual report and it doesn’t make for happy reading.

The health board confirmed it logged 11 new ‘never’ events during 2025/26. That is six more than the previous year and four more than the second highest health board.

As you would expect, “never events” generally are not supposed to happen if health boards are following national safety guidance. The Betsi report doesn’t disclose which events occurred, but hypothetical examples include things like operating on the wrong knee, leaving a surgical instrument inside a patient after surgery, putting a feeding tube in the wrong place, or administering a medicine via the wrong route.

The health board wrote:

Other notable insights included:

• Only half of all patients spent less than four hours in A&E.

• The number of patients who waited more than 12 hours in A&E increased from 38,976 to 43,908 (13% increase) and those waiting more than 24 hours increased from 18,188 to 21,728 (19% increase).

• On average, 318 patients a month who were well enough to leave had their discharge delayed due to delayed assessments and lack of nursing and care home beds.

• Only 55.5% of patients started treatment within the national target.

• Performance on stroke care is below national targets.

• Five self-reported data security breaches triggered referral to the Information Commissioner’s Office and Welsh Government (all have been closed with no further action).

The health board did manage to reduce some of the longest waits, with two-year waits down by 63% and those waiting more than a year for their first outpatient appointment fell by 83%. It also reduced its spending on agency staff from 3.4% to 1.7% of the total spent on staff.

Before the Senedd Election Plaid’s now health minister Mabon ap Gwynfor and Rhun ap Iorwerth indicated that breaking up the health board could be an option for tackling the challenges in the organisation.

You can read our previous special report on Betsi here.

The report includes a letter by the health board’s chief executive Carol Shillabeer, who wrote that the year had “marked a significant period of transition and consolidation” but that the health board “will continue to operate within Special Measures, with a clear expectation of continuing to drive improvement across quality, performance and governance”.

She added:

“...the year ahead represents a critical phase in moving from early progress to sustained delivery with many significant challenges to address. The Health Board’s focus will be on demonstrating consistent improvement in patient safety, access and outcomes, and providing clear evidence of impact across all services.”

Ms Shillabeer, who has been in the role since 2024 having taken over as interim the previous year, is the highest paid Welsh health board chief, earning an annual salary of £262,500. Betsi is the largest health board in Wales delivering healthcare services to about 700,000 people.

Wildfire aerial support delayed due to operators fighting fires in England and Scotland

Drought has been declared in the north of Wales with the country forecast to experience its fourth heatwave of the year in the coming days.

Last week as several significant wildfires burned in parts of the country, services came under some criticism regarding air cover and helicopter capacity to contain fires.

By Thursday, there were two significant fires at the Rhinogydd near Harlech, and one in Blaenavon. The former two affected Natural Resources Wales (NRW) managed land.

Tackling these requires specialist equipment.

NRW has contracts with four separate operators for helicopter support, specifically to be deployed to help contain wildfires. The contracts run from 2025 to 2029 with work estimated at a value of £1m (according to a contract award notice).

But on Thursday this newsletter approached NRW who said all four operators had been “approached to support the efforts to tackle wildfires” and “no suitable aircraft has yet become available”. NRW’s operations manager told the media that services were busy fighting fires in England and Scotland.

One was eventually secured and sent to Rhinogydd on Friday morning. But the delay has led to calls for greater aerial support to tackle wildfires, including this petition started by an ecologist that attracted more than 7,500 signatures.

In a written statement, Siân Gwenllian MS, Cabinet Minister for Local Government, Housing and Planning, said:

“There are varying views within the emergency services and associated agencies about the role of helicopter firefighting support, but it was requested by the Fire and Rescue Service at the Rhinogydd site.

“I intend to review the current capabilities available to fight wildfire, including aerial support, to identify what additional capabilities may be required, and what potential costs might emerge.”

Longer waiting lists ‘disappointing and unacceptable’

The latest waiting list data for Wales is out and it shows more people are facing the longest waits for treatment.

Waiting list data published by the Welsh Government, which works two months in arrears, shows that 4,208 people were waiting two years or more for treatment, up from 3,694 the previous month. The overall waiting lists were also up month-on-month. More than half of the longest waits were in the Betsi health board area.

June also saw the highest number of emergency department attendances recorded for that month, with prolonged hot weather leading to more people turning up to A&E with heat-related issues.

Health minister Mabon ap Gwynfor called the figures “disappointing and unacceptable” and said:

“Through our clinically-led surgical hub programme we will strengthen local capacity, get patients treated quicker and ensure that elective care demand is managed more sustainably within day-to-day NHS activity. We are committed to delivering our investment to support waiting list reductions this year. “

Menai transport nightmare continues

We wouldn’t normally bring you traffic updates in this newsletter, but this one has a bit more weight to it. Literally.

On Monday, the Menai Suspension Bridge, one of two main arteries connecting Ynys Môn to mainland Wales, was shut again after a vehicle drove over it that was double the weight limit currently in place as a safety measure. It happened near rush hour without warning, forcing motorists onto the already congested Britannia Bridge.

Politicians are well aware of the problem. Locals we have spoken to recently say this has become a saga of repeated disruption, gridlock and emergency inspections that are wasting time and a great deal of public money.

We will be covering this in more detail in a future newsletter but if you would like to discuss the issue or have been affected by it, drop us a line at ryan@willhayward.co.uk.

Is Wales hitting its air pollution targets?

The Senedd Research team have published a new report looking at air quality in Wales with some interesting observations.

Researchers found there was a 53% reduction in average airborne pollutants in Port Talbot in the three months after the majority of the steelworks was shut down, compared to the previous six-year average.

We don’t yet know what the impact of the new electric arc furnace (EAF) currently undergoing installation at Port Talbot will be. You can catch up on our long read examining the future of steel in Port Talbot here.

The electric arc furnace will be less polluting than the old blast furnace. Just one chimney at the steelworks was previously responsible for almost 20% of Wales’ emissions. Though significantly less than traditional blast furnaces, an EAF will still produce some pollution including from dust particles, metal fumes, carbon gases, and other toxic chemicals.

Are the 50mph limits reducing pollution?

In other parts of Wales, annual nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels at five 50 mph sites – Wrexham, Pontypridd, Port Talbot, Deeside and Newport – have also dropped below the legal threshold as of 2024.

Previously, the Labour Welsh Government said it would consider removing 50mph limits to alleviate congestion at M4 ‘bottlenecks’ if pollution dropped below legal levels.

But currently we can’t say with confidence how much of the reduction is actually down to 50mph.

The report said:

“it is challenging to disentangle the specific contribution of speed limits to this improvement, given other contributing factors such as improved car efficiency and changing working patterns.”

So what is causing the fall in pollution in these areas? Well the figures show there was 1–6% less traffic in 2024 than in 2018 for all 50mph sites that were measured. However, as you can see from the graph below, this alone can’t seem to account for the fall in pollution.

Between 2018 and 2024, the reduction in pollution on these five roads was proportionally greater than the reduction in traffic. The ‘excess’ improvement on the M4 in Newport was almost 25%.

More exploration needs be carried out on what has caused the drop but it’s great news for the people living in these areas. NO2 is toxic and worsens the effects of asthma, lung and heart disease.

Reform MSs join campaign trail in Clacton

Reform UK Senedd members travelled to Clacton over the weekend lending support to party leader Nigel Farage who decided run for a seat he already had against a bin.

Gareth Beer, Stephen Senior, Carmelo Colasanto and Cai Parry-Jones posed for a photograph with Nigel Farage in a pub garden on Saturday with the weeks counting down to the vote on August 13.

They were also joined by Corey Edwards, who withdrew his candidacy from the Senedd election earlier this year after a photograph emerged of him performing a Nazi salute. He now works as a taxpayer funded advisor to Reform inside the Senedd.

In a video posted online, Laura Anne Jones MS repeated the Farage line that this by-election amounted to the “people versus the establishment who are committed to try and silence Reform” while Cai Parry-Jones said that “the old political parties haven’t even bothered to show up”.

Farage called the election following mounting scrutiny over his finances. Labour’s National Executive Committee called it a “circus” and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called it “fake” as they announced they wouldn’t be standing candidates, along with the Lib Dems, Green Party and Restore Britain.

A record 34 are standing in the byelection, though, including a number of novelty candidates and independents.

Earlier this month, Ipsos in the UK polling of British adults put Count Binface ahead of Farage in a hypothetical forced head-to-head to win the Clacton by-election, and bookies have this week been offering odds of 9/1 for the intergalactic space warrior to come out on top. It’s worth noting that the odds are still overwhelmingly suggesting Farage will retain his seat.

Plaid MS strenuously campaigning against rail investment in his own constituency

Lindsay Whittle MS has taken a vocal stance against a £33m upgrade to public transport in Caerphilly which he says “the town doesn’t need”.

Designs for a new bus and rail interchange station in Caerphilly were unveiled by the Labour-run council in 2023, with plans to demolish the current separate station buildings, as part of the town’s 2035 masterplan. The council is currently seeking planning permission for the hub.

In a video posted on Facebook, Mr Whittle urged constituents to protest the “waste of £33m of tax payers money”. He also took issue with the demolition of the existing ticket office buildings.

“At a time when services are cut to the bone, this is the last thing Caerphilly needs,” the Senedd member representing Blaenau Gwent, Caerffili and Rhymni said.

“It will not attract tourists despite what they are trying to convince us. Tourists don’t come to see a glass train station, they come to see Caerphilly Castle. They are coming anyway.”

The Labour-led council previously made the case that the project is necessary due to deterioration of both stations, an old bridge suffering from structural issues and the ticket offices fall below modern sustainability standards. They also argue a new station would act as a modern gateway to boost visitor numbers.

Ongoing upgrades to the South Wales Metro are designed to address seriously substandard rail infrastructure across the Core Valley Lines, including in the Caerphilly county borough area.

Rhun ap Iorwerth has first in-person meeting with Andy Burnham

The First Minister had a “positive and productive” discussion with Andy Burnham at their first meeting as party leaders in Glasgow.

The pair met ahead of the opening of the Commonwealth Games, with Rhun ap Iorwerth saying the conversation focused on “how our governments can work together to deliver for the people of Wales”.

The Prime Minister said he wanted an open and ongoing dialogue with the First Minister on the issues that matter most across Wales.

The UK Labour Party saw a surge in the polls at the end of last week following Andy Burnham’s first week as Prime Minister.

The party recorded its biggest lead (4%) since March 2025 according to More in Common polling for July 24-27. It marked the party’s first lead against Reform with an established pollster since April 2025.

Based on an average of a number of pollsters, Burnham’s net approval rating (those who approve of him, minus those who disprove) is a few points above zero. His net approval stands at +4% (this is high for a UK political figure at present).

Rhun ap Iorwerth also met with First Minister of Scotland John Swinney, with the leaders of the two devolved governments discussing their “shared commitment to fostering closer ties” with the European Union.

Thousands sign petition after badger-culling vote

A petition opposing badger culling in Wales has received the required number of signatures to be debated in the Senedd.

The petition ‘We call upon the Senedd to reject any badger cull in Wales’ hit 13,000 signatures less than a week after it was posted.

It comes after a motion tabled by Reform earlier this month which asked the Welsh Government to consider culling badgers to combat Bovine T, if it is recommended by the TB Technical Advisory Group. The motion passed with Plaid support.

Welsh Government extends three schemes

The Welsh Government has extended three schemes aimed at supporting homeowners and would-be-buyers.

Help to Buy Wales was due to end in September but has been extended until the end of the next financial year on March 31, 2027. The scheme allows people to buy a home with a 5% deposit and up to 20% of the house value borrowed from the government.

Two other schemes, the Empty Homes Grant and Help to Stay, which supports people who are struggling to make their mortgage repayments, have also been extended until next March.

That’s all for this week!

We’ll see you again this weekend.

Thanks for reading,

Ryan and Marcus

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

Hello everyone,

Recess has just started but there is still plenty to talk about. We have a quote from the UK Government which genuinely made my jaw drop, growing discontent in Reform’s Senedd group…oh, and a new Prime Minister.

Before we jump into it, I have had a few people messaging me saying they have not been receiving our emails. I have done some digging with Substack and it is most likely that you have “email notifications” turned off on your Substack account (god knows why it does that). If you are having problems you can read the full guide here.

The FM and the new PM have had their first call

Rhun ap Iorwerth and Andy Burnham have had their first call. The two leaders spoke on Tuesday, after which the First Minister said:

This is similar in tone to what was said in his first call with Starmer. Sir Keir did not stick around long enough for them to have their promised meeting, but it will be interesting to see how long it is until the two leaders meet, given that large parts of Plaid’s plan for their early days in government have been based on “opening negotiations” with the UK Government to reform funding and expand devolution.

Burnham has generally made far more positive noises than Starmer about being open to further and reformed devolution, though he has also been far more England-focussed in his rhetoric. After he took office a Downing Street spokesperson seemed to suggest he was open to deeper devolution in Wales but not for Wales.

A Downing Street spokesperson said:

Growing discontent within the Reform group in the Senedd

We are hearing about growing anger within the Reform group inside the Senedd.

This newsletter understands that following plenary last Wednesday there was a “heated discussion” between chief whip Llyr Powell and some other Reform MSs.

The MSs in question were talking to some members of other parties when Mr Powell apparently told them not to do it. Sources have told us that two of them “took exception to being spoken to like kids.”

This builds on growing discontentment among some in the group (who are the official opposition in the Senedd) that Mr Powell is “showing favouritism” to certain members when it comes to who has been given opportunities to speak in the chamber.

We also understand that about five MSs are seeking to stand as MPs in the event of an election (though this is also causing tensions in the group).

It’s a tough time for the party in Wales at the moment. Their chief of staff David Thomas is travelling around Cymru seemingly trying to reinvigorate the various branches ahead of the next general election. Sources have told us that attendance at some meetings have fallen from “highs of over 100” to “less than half a dozen.”

Reform were approached for comment but did not reply.

An absolutely mad quote

It’s not often that my mouth drops open when I read a quote from a UK Government “spokesperson”. Often their answers are anodyne and cookie cutter. However I was genuinely shocked when I read the quote that the BBC had received from a Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) spokesperson.

The Welsh Government have unveiled their first steps into the devolution of broadcasting powers to Wales, pledging to establish a ‘Shadow Broadcasting and Communications Authority’ with a working group to be established later this year.

Here is the DCMS spokesperson quote in response:

This is a wild response.

What you have here is a UK Labour Government making accusations of “wasting taxpayer money” and “running services into the ground” towards a Welsh Government that for the last 27 years has been run by their own party.

Was this actually signed off by a minister? We approached the DCMS for comment and asked them if they were actually blaming their own party for failures in Wales.

We got no official comment in response but they did indicate that they would continue to work with the Welsh Government on issues related to broadcasting.

The new Welsh Secretary

Cymru has a new Secretary of State for Wales after Andy Burnham’s Cabinet announcement on Monday evening.

Jo Stevens has stepped down and has been replaced by Stephen Kinnock, the MP for Aberafan Maesteg. He is one of several Welsh MPs to have landed jobs in the Burnham Cabinet with Sir Chris Bryant also named Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Vale of Glamorgan MP Kanishka Narayan becoming the new Minister for Artificial Intelligence.

There will be more to say about this in coming months but it’s worth briefly reflecting on a few points:

Should the role exist in its current form?

The Welsh secretary is supposed to be the “voice of Wales in cabinet”. The idea is that they can advocate for Wales inside the UK Government.

But for a long time, it’s just as often been the voice of the UK government in Wales.

I am of the view that the role needs to be totally reformed or simply abolished and replaced by something new.

At the moment it’s the worst of both worlds. It gives Wales the pretence of a voice in cabinet while actually having no power, influence or staff. You can read a Guardian article I wrote on the issue here and a video I made yesterday here.

How did Jo Stevens do as Sec of State?

I first met Jo Stevens the week before I started my training at journalism school (I was actually practicing my shorthand when she knocked on my door). She was out leafleting in 2015 to try and become an MP for the first time. I have always found her affable and friendly, with a superb knowledge of cricket.

However, I think it’s hard to put her term as Welsh Sec as anything other than a disappointment. Not because she wasn’t hardworking, but because she was clearly not enamoured with even the idea of devolution. Her lack of demonstrable success in areas like rail gave a perception that she was arguing for the UK Government rather than for Wales.

Here are two quotes from her a year apart:

“It is utterly illogical to designate [HS2] an ‘England and Wales’ project.”

– then-opposition MP Jo Stevens, 2023

“We can’t go back in time and change the way that [HS2] was commissioned, was managed, and classified.”

– Secretary of State for Wales Jo Stevens after entering government, 2024

It was inevitable that Ms Stevens would have to leave her role. She didn’t have a good relationship with Eluned Morgan when she was First Minister and they were in the same party. She was seen by the new Plaid government as hostile. This isn’t the tone that Burnham wants to set.

What will Stephen Kinnock be like as Welsh Sec?

Upon taking the job Mr Kinnock said:

“It is the privilege of my life to be appointed Welsh Secretary, and to serve the people of Wales as part of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s new Cabinet.

“Wales succeeds when we all pull in the same direction, and I will work across all levels of government to deliver the best possible outcomes for our communities as a dynamic and confident country in a dynamic and strong United Kingdom.

“As Welsh Secretary I will ensure that the Wales Office will continue to champion Wales within the UK Government and that the needs of the Welsh people are prioritised.

“This is about building a strong Wales within a strong United Kingdom where everyone has the opportunity to reach their full potential with good growth in every Welsh postcode and where communities are in control and supported by government at every level.

“I am truly honoured to be taking on this role at such a pivotal time for Wales and for the UK, and I am clear that there is no limit to what we can achieve by working together.”

Since the announcement I have seen many people questioning the appointment, citing Stephen Kinnock’s father Neil who opposed Welsh devolution in 1979.

I have never spoken to Stephen Kinnock about his stance on devolution but, if you look at some of what he has said, he seems quite practical.

In a 2022 interview, Mr Kinnock was asked about whether he would support further devolution or even potentially Welsh independence. He said:

However, we also see echoes of what I think is going to be a key flashpoint between the Welsh and UK Governments around the perception of UK Gov interference in how devolution works within Wales. Local government is devolved and therefore not the responsibility of Westminster to change. But Mr Burnham has already made comments about wanting to do just that.

In 2022 Mr Kinnock also said:

“I think that more UK-wide devolution would be very helpful for devolution in Wales and Scotland as well. And it would ensure that you do not end up with a situation where power gets centralised in Westminster or Cardiff, or Edinburgh. It needs to be to local authorities, local enterprise partnerships, and city region deals that we have in Wales.”

James Evans’ long goodbye

We are just three months into the 48 month Senedd term and one MS has already announced they don’t plan to run again…in 2030.

On Monday, Reform’s James Evans announced he would not be seeking another term in office when the next election rolls around.

Writing on Facebook he said:

Mr Evans does leave the door open to change his mind by saying that this is his plan “as things stand”.

It’s worth noting that the mid-Wales MS also categorically ruled out joining Reform just months before doing so.

In March last year he said he would not be joining Farage’s party who he said had “no serious policies” and “no leader” in Wales while labelling Tory councillors who had jumped to Reform “total hypocrites”. Ahead of his switch he also came on my podcast and called Reform “quite scary” and accused them of using “dangerous rhetoric” towards minorities.

Farming announcements

The Welsh Gov has announced major plans for farming in Wales.

At the Royal Welsh on Monday, Rural Resilience Minister Llyr Gruffydd revealed a new ‘farm to fork’ strategy to link up food policy with production, processing, retail, health, education, public procurement and the circular economy.

As part of the plans, an expert group will look at what is and isn’t working well in Welsh food policy and issue recommendations with a final strategy to be presented to ministers during 2027.

Mr Gruffydd said:

“This strategy will bring together the whole food system; from our farmers and fishers to our retailers, schools and communities, so that we can make better, more joined-up decisions for the benefit of everyone in Wales.”

On Monday ministers also announced £340m a year towards the controversial Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) for three years until 2030, as well as simplifying some parts of the process from next year. Multi-year funding has been a long standing call from the agricultural industry.

Only 50% of farmers have signed up for the new SFS as of this year. Others are opting to stay with the old scheme which will see their funding cut over the next few years until it is phased out.

A Reform Freudian slip?

Some slips of the tongue are simply too funny to ignore.

During last week’s debate in the Senedd on youth employment, Jason O’Connell stood up for several minutes to explain why his party Reform would be abstaining from the vote.

Except he didn’t say ‘Reform’, he said something else.

The thing Plaid and Reform can agree on

The new Plaid Cymru Welsh Government found common ground with its official opposition last week following a debate over the possibility of culling badgers to control Bovine TB.

Reform UK tabled a debate urging the government to consider culling wildlife to control the disease in the event it is recommended by the TB Technical Advisory Group, which has yet to publish its report.

The motion passed with support from Plaid Cymru, Reform UK and the Conservatives, with the Labour group and the Green’s voting against.

Currently the Welsh Government has a ban on the culling of badgers, favouring vaccination and other measures to control the disease. The move diverged from the UK Government’s approach to the disease, with England pursuing widespread badger culling in affected areas.

England recently confirmed culling had ended, in favour of a move towards vaccinating badgers.

Llŷr Gruffydd said he would wait for recommendations from the technical advisory group before considering any change in policy.

Wales gets first EU money since Brexit

Welsh companies and organisations will be able to access R&D funding from an EU scheme, despite our exit from Europe.

Wales has joined the UNITE European Digital Health Valleys project with a £700,000 grant to the Welsh Gov - the first EU grant the Welsh Gov has secured since Brexit.

It means universities, health boards and other bodies will be able to access the scheme, which will allow them to develop, test and scale up healthcare solutions and projects and improve healthcare in Wales.

Wildfires in north Wales

Over the last few weeks we have seen terrible wildfires in north Wales and in England.

As of Tuesday evening fire crews were battling six separate incidents across north Wales with people being asked to avoid the area and to keep doors and windows closed.

Changing wind conditions mean smoke is now affecting communities that weren’t previously impacted, which crews say could become ‘more noticeable’ on Wednesday.

Wildfires are particularly dangerous because they happen in wilder, un-contained stretches of land, meaning they can spread further and more unpredictable and destroy homes and ecological habitats for animals and wildlife. They are also extremely polluting, through smoke, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide that is released into the earth’s atmosphere.

That’s all for this week.

Thanks for reading.

Will and the team

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

We have split this newsletter into three parts:

1. Breaking down Burnham’s latest devolution slip up.

2. Looking at how to make the public care about the constitution.

3. Our interview with Rhun ap Iorwerth looking at whether Plaid needs to go into coalition with Labour.

Those of you who have been with me since the start will know all about Hello Starling. They are media planning and buying specialists.

These guys are experts at getting your product in front of people. I can’t speak highly enough of them. Getting people to sign up for a newsletter about Welsh politics is a difficult task but they have been instrumental in helping the newsletter grow.

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If you support devolution, stop acting like it doesn’t apply to Wales

Let’s imagine a scene.

It’s 2019 and Boris Johnson has just become Prime Minister. He heads over to Wales and parks up on a random high street.

He sits down on a basic fold out chair (because he is a man of the people afterall). He puts up a simple A4 piece of paper saying “Ask Boris Anything” and records himself talking to members of the public.

He discusses a whole host of legitimate issues with them including housing, social care, libraries, business rates and education. He explains how he is going to tackle all of these issues. He addresses these people directly.

One asks him “what are you going to do for teachers”. Without breaking stride he explains that he wants to “rebalance education”.

Another man talks about issues with affordable housing and Boris says “the simple answer is the biggest council house building program of the post war period”.

There is one issue with this - housing, social care, libraries, business rates and education are all devolved to Wales. As Prime Minister Boris Johnson would have no power to tackle this directly. Sure, he could better equip the devolved administrations to tackle these issues. If he increases spending in England on these areas, Wales will get extra money. But when it comes to the policy, the nuts and bolts of actually delivering it in Wales, it’s literally not his job.

If this had happened back in 2019, the then Welsh Labour Government under Mark Drakeford would have been furious at a lack of respect for devolution and Welsh democracy.

But this wasn’t Boris Johnson in 2019, it was Andy Burnham in 2026.

You can watch his video here:

Now to be really clear, I think it is great that the person about to be PM is coming to Wales, talking to people and committing to helping tackle Cymru’s myriad problems. In just that video Burnham spoke to more people in Wales than Starmer did over the entire Senedd election campaign.

The “devolve and forget” mentality that has existed for much of devolution has been a real issue for Wales. We need politicians in Westminster to see a prosperous Wales as part of their remit.

However it may not be the responsibility of Westminster to run many of Wales’ public services, it is their responsibility to ensure that Wales is equipped to run those services.

Now we need to say that this is just a three minute video of what was apparently a two hour event. At one point Burnham does acknowledge that there are different systems in the UK by saying “I’m familiar with the English social care system”.

But there is no escaping the fact that when it comes to messaging, there have been several missteps now from Mr Burnham’s camp where they have failed to reflect the reality of how the UK is constituted.

Of course Andy Burnham himself is not editing these videos, it will be done by a team around him and it’s clear that they either are ignorant of devolution in a Welsh context or they don’t really care about getting this right.

I suspect what happened here was that the soon-to-be PM was in Cardiff for a family event and thought it would be an opportunity for some good PR. I imagine in his head he was out talking to the people of the UK, not doing something specific for people in Wales.

What should he have said?

If Andy Burnham’s support for devolution is what he claims then he should have talked about how he would support the government in Wales to deliver on devolved areas. It should have been about cooperation and enabling.

There is going to be a real challenge for Mr Burnham’s devolved principles soon. Is he going to be willing to work with and support a Plaid Cymru government to deliver on their priorities? I think there is reason for scepticism at this point.

“Supporting devolution” must not mean Wales is treated as merely another region of England. In the context of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, devolution is more than an administrative structure, it is an expression of nationhood.

“Give us what Scotland has!”

In politics, effective messaging has to be simple.

• “Get Brexit done”

• “Take back control”

• “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”

• “Education, education, education”

• “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”

Creating these messages are hard when the challenges we face are complex and multifaceted.

Constitutional issues are the hardest to condense. They are nebulous. They are about processes. This is why it is hard for Plaid Cymru to get issues around devolved funding to really permeate the public consciousness. But they really need the public to care about this. Anyone who looks in detail can see the current system doesn’t work for Wales, but the big question is, how do you get the wider public to look in detail?

Plaid’s messaging would do well to tap into the feeling of fairness. Fairness is a principle that human beings are aware of from very early in their lives.

There are almost no examples of how the set up of the current system gives Wales a better deal than Scotland. The Scots have more autonomy and receive more funding per head. I believe that the slogan “give Wales what Scotland has” would be an immensely powerful message.

If Wales were to get a similar deal to Scotland in the Union it would mean:

• Increased borrowing power.

• An increased reserve.

• The ability to vary income tax bands (this would be massive)

• Devolution of justice, rail, policing, the Crown Estate and some welfare.

Getting people excited about the intricacies of Treasury comparability factors is hard. Getting them to want to be treated fairly, is far easier.

Plaid have been doing a bit of this “give us at least what Scotland has”, but if they are going to get meaningful concessions from the new PM, they will need a simple, relentless and consistent message and the public of Wales behind it.

The Rhun ap Iorwerth Interview

Plaid failed to get their supplementary budget through last week after Labour refused to support it. You can read a full breakdown and analysis of that here.

Ultimately, Wales really needs its parliament to function. We have a lot of challenges and can’t afford our Senedd to be where legislation and decisions go to die.

To try and look at how we can make the next four years effective rather than stagnant, I briefly spoke to First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth. As always I will put my question, his answer, and then some analysis.

Read more

Hello and welcome,

We have a lot for you this week. We are going to start by looking at the vote in the Senedd last night where Plaid failed to pass their supplementary budget. Plus we have Reform UK apparently taking secret pictures of Will eating lunch…

Before we get into the newsletter, we have some good news. We won Best Individual-led Newsletter at the Publisher Awards in London last week. We beat some huge publishers like The Economist, The FT, The i Paper, The Independent and Reach. We also found out yesterday that we have secured three nominations at the Future of Media Awards, in part because of our election coverage.

This thing only exists because of you people. Thank you for putting your hand in your pockets to support us.

What happened with the budget vote…

Last night Plaid Cymru lost a vote in Senedd to pass their supplementary budget. Let me give you some very brief context before we assess what it means.

So the UK Government recently wrote off lots of debt at English councils that had been built up delivering Additional Learning Needs (ALN) education in England over the years. To be clear, they were not spending more on ALN in England, they were writing off debt.

This generated some extra money for Wales, so the Welsh Gov had £247m of day-to-day spending unallocated.

Plaid wanted to allocate this to reduce NHS waiting times, expand childcare, and extend free school meals. Initially, they had no additional share of this spending allocated to ALN.

To pass this budget Plaid needed the support of either Labour, the Tories or Reform. The Greens said they would support them, but even with that they were still four short of a majority. Reform and the Tories were not really options, meaning Plaid needed Labour to get their supplementary budget through.

Long story short, Labour demanded that Plaid spend more on ALN. Plaid agreed to spend an additional £40m per year for the next three years. Labour instead wanted £100m of the £247m spent on ALN by April next year.

Then yesterday, the day of the vote, it emerged that the trade unions NAHT Cymru and ASCL Cymru were in dispute with the government over a 3.5% pay deal and ALN funding. On Tuesday there were protesters on the steps of the Senedd making a lot of noise about this.

Welsh Labour then announced that they couldn’t support the budget while the Welsh Gov were in dispute with the unions and called on Plaid to withdraw it. The vote ended up going ahead, and Plaid lost.

Who is at fault here?

Let’s start by saying that there is 100% a huge shortfall in ALN support, funding and provision. That is beyond any doubt.

But it is very clear that Labour saw this as an opportunity to give Plaid a bloody nose. There is significant frustration within Labour with what they have perceive to be a blasé approach from Plaid to running a minority government. In simple terms, they feel that Plaid are acting like they have a majority they don’t have.

Plaid, on the other hand, have accused Labour of having no fixed negotiating position and that Labour were invited (and attended) numerous meetings with ministers and officials.

There was genuine shock among Plaid that Labour let the budget fail. They thought they would, at the very least, abstain from the vote to allow it to go through, as Plaid did for Labour’s budget earlier in the year.

This is an embarrassment and can’t happen again

Two things are really obvious here:

• Plaid are not used to being in government.

• Labour are not used to being in opposition.

Plaid were, in my view, naive. You have to operate in the reality you have, not the one you want. They do not have a majority and I think it’s fair to say they went into this believing Labour would support them in the end. They were slow to clock that there was a risk and it was probably not smart to have no additional ALN spending in their initial offer. Of course, they will argue that the whole point of devolution is that Wales can make different decisions to England, but you also have to be savvy operators.

I also find the “Labour are voting with Reform” argument from Plaid a bit tedious. You could say that “Reform voted with Labour”. In Westminster, Plaid have voted with the Tories against Labour several times. Welsh Labour voted against Plaid’s supplementary budget. There was no alliance with Reform.

However, at the same time, I think Labour have been opportunistic to the point of reckless and have overplayed their hand. Yes, Plaid don’t have a majority but they are demonstrably the most senior party with more than four times the amount of MSs that Labour have.

When you are in a negotiation, you have to strike a balance between fighting your corner and living in reality. I have no doubt that Labour MSs passionately believe in increasing ALN support, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the previous Labour government only allocated £9m to ALN this year, and Plaid offered them a 400% increase on that. Plaid made big concessions to Labour, but Labour seemed determined to flex their muscles.

But there are wider points to make here:

• We have just under four years to go of this Senedd term and the most important thing is that we have a parliament that works. Neither Labour nor Plaid can let this keep happening.

• They are each other’s only options. Plaid and Labour are not miles apart in terms of where they sit politically on most issues. When it comes to passing votes in the Senedd, the maths means that the Greens and Lib Dems are, from an arithmetic standpoint, not really relevant. The Tories and Reform offer a vision for Wales and public services that is so far from Plaid/Labour’s that they are not realistic partners. If Plaid and Labour are serious about actually tackling Wales’ problems, they are going to need to grow up, get a grip and collaborate meaningfully.

• Devolution is at stake here. I don’t want to be dramatic, but both parties need to realise that this is bigger than them. No parties have done more than Labour or Plaid to further the idea of Wales having its own democracy and parliament. But devolution needs to justify itself to the people of Wales, and there are many within the Senedd itself who would vote for its abolition. The primary architects of devolution need to fight for it to function - not be content that it merely exists.

An identical script with the names reversed…

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the budget situation is how quickly politicians shift their messaging based on the situation.

Back in the last Senedd, when Labour needed Plaid to get their budget through, Rhun ap Iorwerth said it “wasn’t for us to pass Labour’s budget for them”. During the budget dispute he also said:

“They are gaslighting us and trying to pass on the blame to us for their own failures.”

However, perhaps some of the biggest examples of how political arguments can turn on a dime came from Mark Drakeford and Eluned Morgan.

Here is a video of Mr Drakeford furious that Plaid wouldn’t back a Labour budget in 2025. The sentiment is nearly exactly what we have heard in recent days, just in reverse.

Have a watch of this:

Drakeford said to Rhun ap Iorwerth when he was trying to get Labour’s budget through:

“Believe me, people will see through the argument that you make that, somehow, because this budget doesn’t deliver everything that you would like to see in it, you would rather deny people in Wales all the investment that comes with this budget.”

You can also see Eluned Morgan saying something similar here:

Reform UK leader shares a picture of me

At least once a week I use my security pass to enter the Welsh Parliament estate and sit in the Senedd canteen. I base myself there for a few hours and invite any politician or staff member who wants to talk to me to do so.

It’s a key part of my work. It helps me understand what is happening in Welsh politics, to inform my reporting and keep my finger on the pulse. Since the Senedd election I have been joined by members of literally every party, including Reform.

Yesterday I spoke to several backbench Plaid MSs, one of the Green MSs, Labour advisors and senior Welsh Tories. It seems that someone in Reform saw me speaking to the Plaid MSs and took a picture.

The official Reform UK Wales X account then posted this:

Given the abysmal quality of the photo I can only assume the taker was sprinting at the time.

This was clearly not the work of some overzealous intern because it was reposted by Reform leader Dan Thomas as well as two other Reform MSs.

Several hours later the post was deleted.

I am dealing with this through the official channels but given that other news sites are covering it, I want to address it here.

The ability of the free press to scrutinise and hold politicians to account is vital in a democracy. The deliberate misrepresentation of a journalist’s work from the official opposition inside the Welsh Parliament is very concerning and, in my view, is an attempt to discredit and intimidate reporters. It is not acceptable.

“Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” George Orwell

Ken Skates is the new Welsh Labour leader

Ken Skates MS has been confirmed as Leader of Welsh Labour, after receiving unanimous backing from the Welsh Labour Senedd group.

Mr Skates said:

“I am deeply honoured to have the unanimous backing of my colleagues in the Senedd in seeking the leadership of Welsh Labour.

“I joined the party as a 14-year-old, and my belief still stands that no child’s future should be determined by their background. That no young person should be judged on anything other than the efforts they make and the decency they show to others.

“The Labour movement for me is a movement for fairness, justice, security and liberty. It is a movement that seeks to empower people and communities, to fight against injustice, intolerance, nepotism and cruelty.”

Reform proposes jail for people publishing election leaflets not in Welsh or English

People using the Irish language, Scottish Gaelic and Cornish on campaign material could face prison time under new plans by Reform and reported by Byline Times.

An amendment to UK Labour’s new elections bill tabled by Reform in Westminster and signed by all the party’s MPs has demanded all election material be “in the English language or the Welsh language” only.

Using any other language in material would be a criminal offence punishable by up to six months in prison or a fine. It would apply in the whole of the UK.

Senedd committee accused of ‘misinformation’

Last week we reported Andrew RT Davies’ outrage over the new environment committee being contacted by Climate Cymru, a climate action group.

The group have now published an open letter to committee chair James Evans accusing Mr Davies of “promoting misinformation” after he accused Climate Cymru of “dictating the agenda” on social media after they sent an email to committee members requesting a meeting.

Climate Cymru said they had contacted politicians in good faith to discuss “very real, tangible crises” including flooding, heatwaves, insurance and food costs and nature loss. You can read the full letter here.

Ministers extend control of scandal-hit fire service

The Welsh Government have extended their control of a Welsh fire service.

South Wales Fire and Rescue Authority (SWFRA), which oversees South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, had commissioners appointed in February 2024 after a damning report found widespread bullying, harassment, discrimination and an inability from management to tackle problems.

Siân Gwenllian MS, Cabinet Minister for Housing, Local Government and Planning, said this week that although progress had been made including a complete refresh of senior management, not enough has been done to return the force to local control and that oversight by the four appointed commissioners will now continue until after next May’s local election.

Job crisis is taking its toll on nurses

The latest Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW) figures show that 383 newly qualified nursing, midwifery and other healthcare graduates have been left without NHS job opportunities.

These are people who embarked on their courses on the promise it would lead to a career, but now say their life is on hold. They are facing major financial stress and are even considering walking away from the NHS altogether.

It seems crazy we have nurses looking for work when our NHS is so short staffed.

Politicians including the Green Party’s Paul Rock have called on the Welsh Government to work urgently with health boards to address the issue.

Plaid’s plan for housing

In plenary on Tuesday, Rhun ap Iorwerth made a statement about legislation his party is planning to bring forward, including:

1. A bill to strengthen the rights of people living in private rental accommodation in Wales.

2. Community Right to Buy Scheme - A plan to create a scheme that will enable local groups to identify assets deemed to be of high value to their community, giving those groups the first right of refusal if the current owners decide to sell.

3. “Rural-proofing” - This is legislation designed to ensure the needs of people in rural areas are considered in policy-making.

Ministers also pledged to deliver 20,000 additional social homes by 2030. Their target will run from April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2030 and will cover homes let at social rent or intermediate rent. It will include properties that are acquired by councils and housing associations, as well as new builds.

Stuart Ropke, CEO of Community Housing Cymru (CHC), called the announcement “bold and ambitious” but called on the Welsh Gov to “take urgent action to dismantle the barriers holding back delivery. We need a long-term funding guarantee, faster planning decisions, and immediate solutions to environmental gridlocks like nutrient neutrality that are delaying much needed homes.”

Wales is not unique in facing a housing crisis, but differs from England in some respects. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that previous rent frameworks in Wales have meant social rents - those provided by councils and social landlords - are only 17% behind market levels. In England, they are about 50% below.

The lack of affordable housing and rent levels regularly crop up among the big ticket issues in Wales. We covered previously how Welsh Labour were unable to meet their social homes target on time. A big part of measuring Plaid’s success will depend on whether they can meaningfully tackle the housing issue.

Council’s Labour group splits amid further party disquiet

Four councillors have quit Neath Port Talbot Council’s Welsh Labour group ahead of the local elections next May.

Councillors Rhidian Mizen, Oliver Davies, and David Whitelock each made separate announcements indicating their disillusionment with the party on social media in the weeks after Welsh Labour’s crushing defeat in the Senedd election.

Their departure from the Labour group was confirmed at a council meeting last week. They will now sit with the council’s Independent group while Cllr Leanne Jones (who was NPT’s deputy leader in 2021) also quit the party to sit as an unaffiliated member.

In a social media post, Cllr Mizen said he had felt “increasingly disillusioned with the direction Labour is now taking and the policies being pursued”, while Cllr Davies said he no longer believes Labour “represents the working class”.

Cllr Whitelock told his followers the decision was “heart wrenching” but said:

“There is no direction from either London or Cardiff as to where the Labour party is heading with very little or no thought for our pensioners and our less well off.”

NPT’s Labour group is the largest opposition party, with the council led by a coalition of Independent and Plaid Cymru members.

Extreme heat is costing lives in Wales

Wales is this week experiencing another wave of extreme heat after weeks of very little rainfall.

On Sunday night, a major incident was declared as firefighters responded to wildfires in Conwy, Gwynedd and Flintshire. Although no casualties have been reported, health advice was issued to keep doors and windows closed while hillsides burned in the area – that’s not an easy task when temperatures are in the high-20s to mid-30s.

Research from Imperial College London, the Met Office, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimate 2,700 people may have died from heat-related causes in England and Wales during the exceptional hot weather in May and June.

Scientists believe the planet has warmed by about 1.4C since pre-industrial times, with compounding impacts on human health and the natural world.

All this underscores Wales’ increasingly pressing need to adapt to rising temperatures and increase efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

One well-established measure to improve resilience to extreme heat is increasing urban tree canopy cover. Planting more trees in densely populated areas mitigates the heat island effect, while enhancing public spaces, and providing better urban wildlife habitats.

Wales has stalled in this goal. A 2016 report from Natural Resources Wales identified the benefits to public health, and mapped overall tree canopy growth from 2006 to 2013 – noting Wales has a significant opportunity to improve.

But the latest update to that report, published in 2020, found there had only been a 0.07% increase in overall urban canopy cover by 2019. And while the overall cover has basically stayed the same, the number of individual trees has decreased and findings reveal an ageing population of urban trees which are not being replenished.

Reform pushes debate on wildlife cull

A debate tabled by Reform chief whip Llŷr Powell today may push Plaid to clarify its position on measures to control the spread of Bovine Tuberculosis (bTB).

The party proposes the Welsh Government make “targeted wildlife control” a part of its approach to bTB eradication if the Bovine TB Technical Advisory Group recommends it (to date, it hasn’t).

Badger culling has not been used by the Welsh Government to control the disease since 2012. According to the RSPCA, new incidents of bTB in Wales have still declined by 40% since 2010.

But the compensation bill to remunerate farmers affected by control measures has outstripped the budget allocation every year since 2021, according to an FOI response from the Welsh Government.

More than £111.5m in compensation has been issued since 2021 to farmers who have had animals slaughtered to control the spread of Bovine Tuberculosis (bTB). The budget allocation for compensation payments over that period was £64m.

Around 10,000 cattle are slaughtered annually in Wales to control the spread of bTB, at considerable public expense and inflicting a heavy toll on affected farmers’ livelihoods. In 2024/25, just shy of 13,000 animals were slaughtered costing the taxpayer £28m in compensation payments – the heaviest year since 2021.

Wales’ strategy to control bTB has differed from that of England’s where badger culling has persisted. The RSPCA says 247,000 badgers have been killed as part of its disease prevention programme since 2013. But the charity says there is a growing body of evidence that badgers play a limited role in the spread of the disease, with the majority of infections occurring within and between herds. A new strategy for England published last month will see a vaccine deployed in cattle from 2030.

Animal rights groups including the RSPCA and the Badger Trust remain concerned over what path Plaid Cymru will take. Its manifesto included references “implementing a new approach to managing bTB – one which recognises wildlife as a source of infection and enables scientifically validated control methods”.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading.

Will and the team

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

Today’s newsletter is split into three parts:

1. The Reform MS who owns shares in an oil company.

2. What Nigel Farage’s battle with a bin means for Wales.

3. Looking at Burnham’s plan for Cymru and whether we are going to have a new Sec of State for Wales.

Those of you who have been with me since the start will know all about Hello Starling. They are media planning and buying specialists.

These guys are experts at getting your product in front of people. I can’t speak highly enough of them. Getting people to sign up for a newsletter about Welsh politics is a difficult task but they have been instrumental in helping the newsletter grow.

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Reform MS owns shares in an oil company

A Reform Senedd Member who has repeatedly been dismissive about tackling climate change owns shares in an oil company worth tens of thousands of pounds.

Cai Parry-Jones is Reform’s shadow cabinet minister for Finance and Government Efficiency.

In one social media post Mr Parry-Jones derided people “crying about global warming”:

In another he called on climate roles in the Welsh Government (of which there are about 50) to be scrapped.

These roles include jobs which help plan for and mitigate the impacts of heatwaves and coastal erosion that we are seeing because of climate change. They also help farmers prepare for the inevitable consequences of global heating.

In another post he decried the “high regulation” and “red tape” that actions to reduce emissions would cause.

The evidence for climate change is overwhelming, as is the fact it is driven by human beings burning fossil fuels like oil. The evidence is also categorical that it will be people from deprived backgrounds that suffer most from the effects of climate change.

Given that the data we have suggests that people from poorer backgrounds are more likely to vote Reform, one has to wonder why the party would be continuously lobbying against the best interest of their voters?

On his declaration of interests, Mr Parry-Jones said that he owned more that £38,190 worth of shares in Phillips 66, who are an American multinational energy company headquartered in Houston, Texas.

The company owns 13 refineries with the capacity to produce 2.2 million barrels of net crude oil per day as well as owning more than 15,000 miles of pipelines.

We approached Cai Parry-Jones to see if he wanted to comment on his ownership of shares in an oil company while opposing measures to tackle climate change – he did not reply.

According to Desmog, Reform UK has received £24 million from oil and gas interests, accounting for more than two thirds of its total income.

What the Farage situation means for Wales

There are so many potential scenarios around the Clacton byelection that would be, frankly, terrible for Farage.

His aim in calling the byelection was, apart from overshadowing Burnham and delaying an investigation into his finances, to have a strong win against the main parties to try and portray the most important message that any populist politician can transmit – “I am still a winner”.

But instead he is essentially in a one-on-one fight with a bin.

There is only one outcome that is good for Nigel. He wins. He wins big. He wins with a decent sized turnout. Anything else is an embarrassment.

If the coming result is even remotely close, even if he wins, he loses.

Now I should say, I think the chances of Count Binface winning is fairly low. But there are two reasons why the Clacton byelection has turned from easy-narrative-reset to highly annoying banana skin for Reform:

Count Binface is a perfect unity candidate. Imagine if the Tories, Labour, Greens and Lib Dems had agreed to field just one candidate between them to try and unseat Farage. In all likelihood it would have been a Conservative (they came 2nd in the seat for the General Election). There would have been many Labour/Green/LibDem voters who would never have been able to bring themselves to vote Tory – even to get rid of Nigel. However, an “independent space warrior” is someone that will be palatable for anyone opposed to the Reform leader.

There is the perception of very little jeopardy. We know that one of the biggest motivators of turnout in elections is when the result is in doubt. In Clacton, the fact that the election result isn’t in doubt, could cause the result to be in doubt.

Unfortunately for Reform, the narrative of the byelection isn’t Reform versus several other parties (and what Farage would call “the establishment”). Rather it is those who support Farage versus those who don’t. I can see the lack of jeopardy impacting each side in different ways.

Farage supporters likely see their guy’s win as a foregone conclusion. Add to this the fact that we know Reform voters are often less likely to vote, and Reform has a problem. Imagine if we get nearer the vote and it looks like the result could be close, Reform will literally have to go out and tell their supporters that they need them because their leader is at risk of losing to a bin.

By contrast, we know from the Senedd election that for opponents of Reform, “stopping Farage” is an immense motivator.

So what does this mean for Wales?

If Farage were to lose his seat I think we would see a near-immediate disintegration of Reform in the Welsh Parliament. We saw a similar scenario play out when UKIP won some seats in the Senedd (at the time known as the Welsh Assembly). Farage is a glue holding together a group of polarised magnets who naturally push away from each other. When his influence ceases to be a factor, they will return to their natural state.

If Farage were to win narrowly in Clacton but be a more diminished figure, I think the disintegration of Reform would still happen, but more slowly. Populist figures do not really trade on a policy platform, they trade on winning. The moment they are no longer seen as a vehicle for others’ advancement, they are in real trouble.

I could see Reform splintering three ways:

1. The Farage loyalists. They will stay with Reform as long as their guy is heading it up. Llŷr Powell is a key one of these figures.

2. The ambitious gravy train riders. These are the ones who can’t believe they have landed an £80k-a-year job and are determined to maximise the money and status they currently have. I could see these leaving to form a Restore group in the Senedd.

3. The sensible-ites. There is a group within Reform who have genuinely moved into politics to make a meaningful difference and hoped Reform could offer an opportunity to do that. I know some of these are already frustrated with the current social-media-content-generation style of oratory from some of their fellow members. I could see some of these sitting as independents or trying to join the Tory group. For the record, I understand the Welsh Conservatives would be open to this but would not take anyone who previously defected from the Tories to Reform.

What does Burnham actually have planned for Wales?

Last week we reported how Andy Burnham’s team had published an absolute dog turd of an opinion piece where they had just copied and pasted an article for Wales, Scotland and London while substituting in different places names.

It was abysmal. It made commitments to respect devolution while at the same time also saying that Westminster would be directly interfering in devolved policy areas. As one Welsh Labour insider told me – “it was a gift to Plaid Cymru”.

But now Mr Burnham has penned a brand new article, published on WalesOnline, which strikes a different tone to the first one. Let’s take a look at what it says and how it has landed within Welsh Labour…

Read more

Hi everyone,

Here is your latest midweek update. We have lots for you this week including some concerning early signs from Andy Burnham regarding devolution and some more declarations of interest from Welsh politicians. Let’s hope they don’t quit to avoid scrutiny…

Farage produces a dead cat

The dead cat strategy is the political tactic of deliberately making a shocking announcement to divert media attention away from problems or failures in other areas.

The Reform leader was Pussy Galore yesterday as he announced he was going to resign his seat in Clacton, to trigger a byelection in Clacton, so he could run in Clacton, to avoid the parliamentary standards watchdog investigation into his £5m gift, which could force a byelection in Clacton if it found he committed wrongdoing

Make sense?

In a naked attempt to seize the narrative, Mr Farage and Reform went deep into the Donald Trump playbook, entering full victim mode by claiming there was a campaign against him by the “establishment”.

Reform in Wales posted:

It’s worth bearing in mind that since 2016 two MPs have been murdered.

Obviously this newsletter is focussed on Wales so at the weekend we will look at what impact the Farage situation will have on Cymru.

That Burnham article

There has been a bit of furore this week over an article from Andy Burnham.

Mr Burnham had written several opinion pieces about devolution in different parts of the UK. Versions were sent to titles in Scotland and London who published them.

A Welsh version of the piece was sent to WalesOnline last Monday (June 29th). However, WoL were concerned that the article appeared “confused” over where power and responsibility lies in Wales. Basically, it didn’t reflect the reality of devolution.

So they approached the author telling them that they’d have to include a disclaimer if they ran it and asked if Mr Burham’s team would correct it.

WalesOnline chased it up again on Thursday but got no corrected version.

By Friday, WalesOnline were getting queries from other journalists asking whether they had a Welsh version. We understand that WalesOnline, having given Burham’s team five working days to correct the piece, decided to run their own story titled: ‘An error-filled Andy Burnham opinion piece about Wales raises questions.’

Fair play to WalesOnline for not simply publishing the piece - it was misleading in how it reflected the realities of devolution in the UK.

When you read it, you can clearly see they wrote basically the same piece for each nation.

This is what Burnham wrote for the WalesOnline article:

“In Wales, that feeling has its own shape. It is felt in Merthyr. It is felt in Rhyl. Port Talbot feels it. It is felt in towns like Wrexham, communities like the Valleys, and places that have waited too long for politics to work for them.”

Another piece for the London Standard said:

“In London, that feeling has its own shape. It is felt in Newham. It is felt in Brent. Croydon feels it. It is felt in towns like Barking, communities like Tottenham, and in places that have waited too long for politics to work for them.”

There are also commitments to do things in Wales that are already largely devolved, such as:

• “greater public control of essential services such as water, housing, energy, and transport”

• “Number 10 North overseeing the biggest council house building programme since the post-war era”

• “reform business rates to support pubs and high street businesses”

• “more 45-day work placements and apprenticeships for young people”

These are the responsibility of the Senedd, not Westminster.

There are questions emerging whether when Mr Burnham says “we need to strengthen devolution”, he really means “Westminster is going to focus more on devolved issues”.

Dan Thomas’ register of interests

We have been covering the MSs’ register of interests as they have started being published on the Senedd website.

It means we now know a bit more about Reform in Wales leader Dan Thomas, whose interests have been revealed to include four rental properties in England co-owned with his spouse - two in London, one in Oxfordshire and one in Somerset - all with a “substantial value” over £76,000. It also includes a family home and four acres of land in Sardinia which is “occasionally rented out.”

To be clear Mr Thomas is breaking no rules by simply owning and renting out multiple properties. The annual income he gets from these is more than £21,000.

The basic salary for every MS is £79,817 per year, but if you are leader of a Senedd Group - which Dan Thomas is - you get an extra £16,212 plus £1,248 per Senedd member up to a maximum of £44,896. So all in all Mr Thomas’ role is worth £124,713 to him.

Last week we reported that sources had told us Mr Thomas is considering running to be an MP. This would actually be a salary cut for him unless he gets a senior role in a future Reform UK Government, as an MP’s salary is around £93,000.

Tensions rising ahead of pivotal budget vote

The minority Plaid government is facing its biggest test to date as a vote on its supplementary budget looms next week (July 14).

Plaid’s plans include £100m to tackle NHS waiting lists and £40m for repairs to schools, as well as £246m held back as unallocated cash to manage further costs that may come up during the coming year.

The extra cash mainly comes as a consequence of extra money being spent in England to pay off debts of English councils that were built up through supporting young people with additional learning needs.

Gaining the support of Welsh Labour’s nine members will be key to Plaid passing its budget. But last week Plaid lost a vote on a motion tabled by Welsh Labour calling on the government to spend more of that cash on pupils with additional learning needs in Wales as well.

The motion is not binding but does indicate feeling among other parties.

Pressure was maintained by interim Welsh Labour leader Ken Skates at FMQs on Tuesday, who asked the First Minister why there “is not a single single extra penny allocated towards additional learning needs in your supplementary budget” even though “it came as a result of increased investment in ALN, or SEN as it is in England”?.

The FM said he was keen to work on ALN but “we work within tight constraints, including the hundreds of millions of pounds of overspend that this Government inherited from the last, as well as aligning budgets with the people’s priorities”.

New Senedd committee gets off on the wrong foot

Senedd committees are often where politicians put in the long hours and do really important work scrutinising specific issues, producing reports and holding the Welsh Government to account.

It seems that just weeks after forming, a member of the Environment and Rural Affairs Committee (which covers climate change) is already getting hot and bothered over being contacted by… climate change groups.

Committee member Andrew RT Davies posted on social media complaining that members have been emailed by Climate Cymru.

Mr Davies said:

“We can’t let groups like Climate Cymru dictate the agenda. I certainly won’t be going along with it. I hope my fellow Committee members follow suit.”

Looking at Climate Cymru, it is a varied network of academics and volunteers whose goals are Wales achieving Net Zero and its climate justice goals. On their website they say “the climate and nature emergency requires urgent, fair action. We believe that action should be guided by science and the voices of people across Wales.”

The politician chairing the committee is Reform’s James Evans, whose party have actively promoted climate misinformation and repeatedly called for doing away with what they call “net stupid zero.”

Wales needs to catch up with England and Scotland

When you are a wheelchair user, are pushing a pram or have sight issues, people parking on the pavement is a nightmare.

A recent survey from charity Living Streets has revealed that 9 in 10 (91%) councillors in Wales said they had received complaints from constituents about vehicles parked on the pavement.

In May, the UK government announced more powers for local authorities in England to restrict pavement parking, but no such legislation yet exists in Wales. In Scotland, pavement parking has been banned since 2023.

Ruth Billingham, Head of Campaigns, Living Streets said:

“For too long, Wales’s pavements have been no-go zones for people with wheelchairs, guide dogs and pushchairs. Blocked pavements force people off the safety of the pavement and into oncoming traffic. It also stops thousands of us from enjoying the benefits of walking more.

“The new Welsh Government has the opportunity to take action against pavement parking and avoid getting left behind Scotland and England.”

A champagne breakfast with Farage that costs a pretty penny…

Reform have announced their party conference in Birmingham in September.

Some of the prices to attend are what you’d expect (£55 for a Reform member) but others are pretty eyewatering.

Take a look at this:

For the princely sum of £3,000 you can buy a ‘Platinum’ pass that includes a “champagne breakfast” with Farage himself along with priority access and “premium hospitality” throughout the event.

If attending the three-day conference isn’t enticing enough a prospect, you can also buy a ticket for the ‘Official After-Party’ on the Friday, which promises “an unforgettable evening of drinks, dancing and entertainment in great company.”

The dress code? “Dress to impress.”

Will Labour learn lessons?

Back in April 2024, former First Minister Carwyn Jones was appointed by Vaughan Gething to lead an internal review into Welsh Labour’s campaign finance and leadership election rules. This came after the controversy around the £200k Mr Gething’s campaign took from a man convicted of environmental offences.

Yet it wasn’t until April 2026 that the work actually got going. This newsletter understands that people within Welsh Labour expected at least the interim findings to be published before a new leader was officially announced.

This makes sense. If the aim is to learn lessons from the Gething/Miles leadership race, it would seem bizarre that Welsh Labour would have gone through the process of getting a new leader before that process is done.

There was an expectation that the interim findings would be discussed at a meeting of the Welsh Labour Executive Committee today. However, sources within the party tell us that it’s unlikely that any findings from the review will come out before a leader is selected.

Who do I talk to?

We are now a couple of months out from the election and the reality of the ridiculous electoral system introduced in the last election is still making itself known to people in Wales.

Given everyone now has six MSs, there is confusion about who constituents should approach with issues. We have had a lot of messages about this. Here is a good example:

Another issue with this is that it allows lazy MSs to coast when it comes to case work while diligent Members pick up the slack.

When we have been in the Senedd recently, some of the new MSs have told us they are spending more time in meetings than they are implementing what has been discussed in those meetings. Lord knows how they are navigating constituency work on top of it all.

Bridgend councillor takes an interest in Birmingham council business

A Welsh Restore councillor told his Facebook followers “Islam is not compatible with western civilization” after sharing a video circulated by Tommy Robinson.

Owain Clatworthy, Bridgend County Councillor for Pyle, Kenfig Hill and Cefn Cribwr, was elected under Reform UK’s banner and was named among the party’s Senedd candidates. But he stood down from candidacy following a row over Reform’s selection process and defected to Rupert Lowe’s Restore party.

The councillor shared a video last week clipped from the swearing-in ceremony of Birmingham City Council’s Lord Mayor, Zaker Choudry, which took place in May. During the clip, an Islamic prayer is read out – a longstanding tradition where each Lord Mayor asks a religious leader of their chosen faith to deliver a blessing at the start of their term of office.

The video had been widely circulated by far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

Cllr Clatworthy captioned the video saying:

“This is not integration. This is Replacement.”

In a later post, he claimed: “Attempts are already underway to silence me. My crime? Speaking the truth about mass illegal immigration, failed integration, and the defence of British values in a Christian country.”

Adding:

“I don’t care what they call it. We’re taking our country back.”

We asked Mr Clatworthy if he had anything else to say about his posts but he didn’t respond.

‘Voice of the people’ voices support for death penalty

You might remember Vale of Glamorgan Cllr Brandon Dodd. We covered him in our special report on Reform last year.

He was elected in the Vale as a Reform councillor in September 2025 and through the campaign promised to be a “real voice” for local people.

We reported that he then went months without speaking and missed crucial votes relating to his local ward.

Mr Dodd has now seemingly found his voice on social media calling for the death penalty to be introduced. It seems that on the rare occasions the voice of the people does use his voice, it is publicly calling for people to die.

More election results!

Last week we brought you a glut of by-election results in Wales to replace councillors who had been elected as MSs.

Since then there have been even more.

On July 3rd, Reform held onto one in Torfaen Council where Jonathan Hollins was elected to replace Jason O’Connell, who became an MS in May (worth noting he was previously elected to Torfaen council as an independent, and was formerly a Tory member.)

There were also three held in Powys to replace Plaid’s Elwyn Vaughan, and Claire Johnson‑Wood and Iain McIntosh from Reform. Plaid held onto their seat while Reform successfully defended one but lost the other to the Lib Dems. Incidentally, the Reform candidate who lost was Mr McIntosh’s wife, Dawn McIntosh.

Tomorrow (Thursday, July 9th) is another bumper by-election day, with no fewer than seven taking place. They are:

• Cardiff

• Flintshire (2)

• Gwynedd

• Neath Port Talbot

• Pembrokeshire

• Vale of Glamorgan

Jailed man who spent £500k to clear his name will not be compensated

A man who spent £500,000 to clear his name after he was wrongly jailed for sex offences has had his claim for compensation turned down.

Brian Buckle from Fishguard in Pembrokeshire was convicted of historical child sex abuse back in 2017 and given a 15-year sentence but was found not guilty at a retrial after a five-year legal wrangle when new forensic evidence and witnesses were brought forward.

The BBC reports that Mr Buckle has had his second appeal for compensation rejected by the Ministry of Justice.

In 2014 a law change now means compensation is only paid to those wrongly convicted if they can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they did not commit the crime, which Mr Buckle’s barrister says is impossible as no DNA or CCTV evidence exists to prove his innocence.

Half a million goes to coastal communities in Wales

Seven projects have received a share of £540,761.

The Welsh Gov funding supports oyster restoration, marine monitoring, harbour improvements and seafood trail development.

The projects - spanning Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Conwy, Flintshire, Gwynedd and Ynys Môn - range from establishing a purpose-built native oyster spatting pond in Laugharne to a new community-led marine observatory programme across the Menai Strait.

The funding supports work that includes citizen science monitoring in Cardigan Bay, a sustainable seafood trail in Conwy, harbour safety improvements at Connah’s Quay and Amlwch Port, and enhanced marine mammal monitoring in Gwynedd under the Clust i’r Môr initiative.

This newsletter is up for some awards!

As this lands in your inbox, the newsletter team is on a train to London to attend The Publisher Newsletter Awards where we have three nominations.

We are not holding out much hope. Our little team of three is up against the FT, Economist, Channel 4, Reuters and the BBC.

However it’s lovely to be nominated and it is a testament to what we (and I include all of you in this) have managed to build here in just 20 months.

Young people talk about the barriers they face

On Sunday we looked at income deprivation across Wales, especially for children. A new mini documentary from ACT has looked at young people across South Wales and the barriers they face, giving them a platform to share their experience. It explores themes of digital safety, community, role models and lack of opportunities.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and please do consider becoming a paid subscriber. We can’t do this without you.

Will and the newsletter team.

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

I want to start with a quick request.

When I was working for a large media organisation, covering politics in the summer was always tricky because all of the politicians head off on their holidays and there is less “political stuff” going on.

But what is great about long-form newsletters for story telling is that less “breaking” news simply leaves more space for deep dives, explorations and talking about ideas. I am particularly keen to talk about something that is so often overlooked in a Wales context - the economy.

Despite the fact issues with the Welsh economy underpin so many of our challenges, it’s an area which has often been treated as unimportant and secondary by repeated devolved administrations (when they thought about it at all).

Ahead of looking at the economy I wanted to crowd source ideas and thoughts from our readers. We have just hit 15k followers on this newsletter (thank you by-the-way) and I know that many of you are leaders in your fields/industries.

I would dearly like to hear your thoughts, musings, ideas and insights on the Welsh economy. What works? What doesn’t work? What are the most innovative ways we could improve it?

Obviously “the economy” is very broad. It is a huge interconnected system which interplays with all other parts of Welsh society - education, training, health, transport and the environment. So whether you want to talk about skills, investment, employment, planning, ethical growth, systems, or anything else, get it touch.

In my view, journalism is always best when it is a two way street and news providers stagnate when they stop listening to their readers. Plus, the overwhelming reason I started this newsletter was to foster a better discussion/spotlight on Welsh issues, so let’s have that discussion. You can pop your thoughts in comments or by emailing will@willhayward.co.uk.

Those of you who have been with me since the start will know all about Hello Starling. They are media planning and buying specialists.

These guys are experts at getting your product in front of people. I can’t speak highly enough of them. Getting people to sign up for a newsletter about Welsh politics is a difficult task but they have been instrumental in helping the newsletter grow.

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Understanding deprivation in Wales

In this newsletter we are going to use some great interactive maps to tell the story of Wales’ challenges.

On the surface this may seem technical but stay with me because it’s really not.

Every five years the Welsh Government releases the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (WIMD), a report on deprivation across Wales.

This is done by breaking Wales into ‘small areas’ called LSOAs (this stands for Lower Layer Super Output Areas but don’t worry about that). They are made up of between 1,000 to 3,000 people and there are 1,917 in Wales.

The WIMD looks at a whole range of metrics and ranks all areas of Wales from 1 (the most deprived) to 1,917 (the least deprived). This gives real insight into how parts of Wales are experiencing deprivation in different ways.

Kyle Bright, a journalism student who has written previously for our newsletter, has done some great interactive maps on this, which we will also be referring to below.

Let’s get into it.

What the WIMD can (and can’t) tell us

Being deprived does not just mean being poor. It can also mean having worse access to things like good quality or affordable housing, healthcare, schools, or good-quality internet.

The WIMD measures dozens of factors which are collated into eight groups: income, employment, health, education, access to services, housing, community safety and physical environment.

It measures how deprived an area is relative to others, rather than its absolute level of deprivation. That means that if an area has, for example, gone from the 100th most deprived in 2019 to the 50th in 2025, it doesn’t necessarily mean conditions in that area have worsened or improved, but reflects how its position has changed relative to other areas in Wales.

If you are a government looking to tackle problems today, you want to know where to prioritise so you can allocate funding accordingly.

The most deprived areas of Wales

This map shows the overall deprivation levels for the whole of Wales. You can zoom in to your specific area.

If you want to go even closer you can use the WIMD website map here.

According to the 2025 Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation, the ten most deprived areas of Wales were:

1. Rhyl West 2, Denbighshire

2. St James, Caerphilly

3. Ely 5, Cardiff

4. Caerau 1, Bridgend

5. Rhyl South West, Denbighshire

6. Trowbridge 8, Cardiff

7. Queensway 1, Wrexham

8. Ely 2, Cardiff

9. Rhyl West 1, Denbighshire

10. Rhyl West 3, Denbighshire

The most deprived, Rhyl West 2, is the area round Rhyl High Street.

Rhyl is in a very tourist-heavy part of Wales but has topped deprivation tables for decades.

But we can’t be afraid to talk about deprivation for fear of “running places down”. If we want Wales to reach its potential we need to assess frankly the challenges we have or we are doomed to remain in a spiral of stagnation.

Overall, Blaenau Gwent is the most deprived local authority area in Wales and Monmouthshire the least deprived. Half of the 10 most deprived areas in 2019 remained in the 10 most deprived areas for 2025, so there hasn’t been a whole lot of change in the last six years.

Many of the most deprived areas are in:

• The South Wales Valleys, which have suffered under the decline of industry and coal mining

• Pockets within Cardiff (Grangetown, Riverside, Ely), Swansea (Townhill, Penderry, parts of the city centre) and Newport (areas like Pill), spearheaded by inequality, housing and renting pressures, poor health and low employment and income.

• Coastal or near-coastal areas like Rhyl, Colwyn Bay and Pembroke Dock

• Rural parts of Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Powys, where there is poorer access to services (we will come back to this).

The postcode lottery

One striking thing about these maps is the difference between small areas that are very close geographically.

Look at Riverside 2 in Cardiff, the area around Tudor Street. It ranks 114 out of the 1,917 small areas, making it in the top 6% most deprived areas in all of Wales.

Just over the bridge towards the city centre, Cathays 12, is 1,062 on the list.

Further west you have Riverside 3, which takes in some of Ninian Park Road stretching north to Cowbridge Road East. It is 96 in the list, yet right next to it is Canton 5, which is 970.

A short distance away from Rhyl West 2 - remember, the most deprived small area of Wales - you have Rhyl East 2, which is well down the list at 1,150 out of 1,917.

There are several examples like this where there is a huge disparity in relative deprivation between areas separated by just a few streets.

Deprivation is deeply entrenched in some areas

The WIMD also looks at small areas of ‘deep-rooted’ deprivation, those that have remained within the top 50 most deprived in Wales for the last six publications of WIMD ranks (2005, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2019 and 2025).

As of 2025, these are:

• Rhyl West 2

• St James 3

• Caerau (Bridgend) 1

• Rhyl South West 2

• Queensway 1

• Rhyl West 1

• Penderry 1

• Twyn Carno 1

• Penderry 4

• Pen-y-waun 2

• Cymer (Neath Port Talbot)

Some areas have been ranked among the most deprived areas in Wales for a long time. Two small areas in Rhyl and Wrexham have been ranked within the top 10 since 2005.

A third of the 22 areas of Wales in deep-rooted deprivation are in Swansea, followed by Caerphilly and Rhyl.

Where the housing crisis is hitting hardest

When it comes to housing, which also takes into account factors like overcrowding and housing quality, Gwynedd had the highest proportion of areas in the most deprived 10% in Wales, with 38%, or 27 of its areas, in that group.

The Welsh Gov say this was driven by poor housing conditions, but availability of housing was also a factor, with five of the 27 also in the most deprived 30% on housing availability.

The second highest was Cardiff, which had 33% of its areas in the most deprived 10% in Wales, driven by deprivation in housing availability.

The least deprived areas of Wales

According to the figures, the ten least deprived small areas are:

• 1,917. St Kingsmark 1

• 1,916. Pentyrch and St Fagans 2

• 1,915. Bishopston 1

• 1,914. Dunvant and Killay 4

• 1,913. Coity Higher 3

• 1,912. Church Village 3

• 1,911. West Cross 1

• 1,910. Plymouth (The Vale of Glamorgan) 1

• 1,909. St Kingsmark 2

• 1,908. Heath 1

It is not too surprising to see some of these towards the bottom of the deprivation list. You have St Kingsmark in Chepstow, near the English border, St Fagans, Heath 1, which is known for its large homes and parks, Bishopston 1 on the Gower Peninsula and Plymouth 1, which centres around Penarth.

Most of these are in commuter suburbs, coastal villages and established residential neighbourhoods rather than city centres.

The challenge of living in rural Wales

Deprivation isn’t just about how much income you have. 30% of Wales’ population is rural, proportionately more than England’s. A big factor is how easily you can access schools, a food shop, pharmacy or GP, childcare provider, post office or a library, or good quality internet.

The results here differ slightly in that they are all in west Wales. They are:

1. Llanegwad 2

2. Beguildy

3. Lledrod

4. Melindwr

5. Cynwyl Gaeo

These are all very sparsely populated areas, where it is not unusual for people to live miles from key services like hospitals.

If you live on a farm in the Llanegwad 2 area, your nearest supermarket might be in Llandeilo or Carmarthen, around 10–15 miles away. Your nearest hospital is likely to be Glangwili Hospital in Carmarthen.

Looking a bit further, there are also some really interesting figures on the distances people in some areas have to travel for essential services.

Read more

Hello everyone,

There is a lot to talk about.

Is Reform’s leader in Wales planning to ditch the Senedd? Is Wales going to lose out on cash because of defence spending? What will Burnham mean for Wales?

Let’s get into it!

Debate on the Nation of Sanctuary policy

Later today there will be a debate inside the Senedd on the Nation of Sanctuary policy. No doubt this will be a respectful conversation based on quantifiable data and rooted in reality. But just in case it isn’t, we have written this no-BS guide to the policy and the issue of asylum in Wales.

Reform leader planning to leave the Senedd?

Perhaps surprisingly, given that Reform officially considers this newsletter persona non grata, people within the party sure do like to talk to us.

The picture they paint within the Reform Senedd group is becoming increasingly chaotic.

We have heard from multiple sources that it is currently a “bloodbath” as senior figures jockey for position to be given secure Westminster seats if there is a snap General Election.

This newsletter understands that both leader of the party in Wales Dan Thomas and Laura Anne Jones are hoping to secure their names on favourable ballots if Andy Burnham was to call an election.

The reason this is getting bitter is partly down to Restore. There is a feeling within Reform that if Restore were to stand across Wales, then in all likelihood only Llanelli and Montgomeryshire would be “safe seats” for Nigel Farage’s party.

The optics of Reform’s leader in the Senedd, the official leader of the opposition, jumping at the opportunity to stand for Westminster, would be poor.

We approached the party for comment on this but they didn’t reply.

We have also had sources tell us that in the private group meeting yesterday (Tuesday, June 30th) there was a “huge bust up” between leader Dan Thomas and whip Llyr Powell. It was apparently related to the Nation of Sanctuary with Mr Powell (who Farage calls “Welsh Dave”) directly questioning Mr Thomas’ leadership.

First Minister sends letter to Jo Stevens saying he is “deeply concerned”

First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth has sent a letter to Sec of State for Wales Jo Stevens regarding plans to increase defence spending at the expense of devolved areas.

In it he said that though he “shares a commitment to the safety and security of our citizens in Wales and the wider UK” he is concerned about what this means for Welsh budgets.

He wrote:

He asked Ms Stevens to:

“clarify what representations you have made to your colleagues in UK Government to ensure that the Defence Investment Plan is not being funded to the detriment of Welsh patients and pupils”.

Expect this to come up a lot in the coming months. Welsh budgets being potentially cut with no consultation underlines the haphazard way in which the devolved governments are funded. No long term planning is possible when Barnett is applied in such a “computer says no” way.

What will Burnham mean for Wales?

On that note, it is worth having another look at what a Burnham Government would have in mind for Wales. We have had several indications over the last week.

There was great indignation from Plaid when sources close to Burnham told the BBC that the former Mayor of Manchester would not be reforming the Barnett formula.

Anyone who has read my journalism knows that I believe changing Barnett and the wider funding formula is essential if Wales is to thrive. However, there are ways to make the system work better for Wales without changing Barnett.

If they were to devolve rail and legislate so that Wales was guaranteed a fair share of R&D funding it would have a huge beneficial impact on Wales without changing Barnett. I am not saying he will do this, just that Barnett reform isn’t the only way to make change.

If Burnham wants to make an impact quickly, changing Barnett would likely involve a lengthy fight with the Scots.

What is concerning is this article he wrote for The Scotsman where he talks about how he wants to influence areas that are devolved like housing and schools. It’s not the job of Westminster to dictate how the devolved nations deliver on devolved areas. It’s their job to equip the devolved nations as well as possible to succeed.

I hope I am wrong and that Burnham isn’t considering a Labour version of Boris Johnson’s muscular unionism.

Suit you sir…

We are now at the point where some of the gifts and expenses of the new Senedd MSs are starting to drop. As you would expect, we have been keeping a keen eye on them.

One of those we found is from Reform MS John Clark, who received a gift of £750 worth of three ‘lounge suits’ from a Bernard Jones, just weeks after he got into office.

We approached Mr Clark for comment on why he had been given these and who Mr Jones was. He didn’t respond.

All the Welsh byelection results since the Senedd election

Since the election in May, a lot of byelections have been taking place in Wales.

Most of these have been to fill seats vacated by ex-councillors who were elected to the Senedd, but it has been interesting to see these electoral indicators after the election.

Here’s how it breaks down:

• Reform were defending five council seats but only managed to hold onto two and lost three, though they did gain a previously-independent seat in Denbighshire.

• Plaid retained four seats they previously held, lost one and gained one.

• Welsh Labour defended one of their seats and gained another.

• The Tories gained one seat and lost one.

• The Lib Dems gained one seat.

Here’s the full breakdown of the results:

• Swansea (Fairwood), May 29th: the Lib Dems gained this seat from the Tories. The election was held after the death of long-serving Tory councillor Paxton Hood-Williams.

• Wrexham (3), June 19th: Three wards held byelections to replace Carrie Harper, Marc Jones and Becca Martin who were elected to the Senedd for Plaid. All three seats were retained by Plaid, though it was close - in the Queensway ward Plaid’s Pol Wong beat Reform UK’s Robbie Green by just eight votes.

• Swansea (2), June 19th: In Mumbles, the Tories gained the seat from Reform, whose councillor Frances O’Brien was elected to the Senedd (though she defected from the Tories to Reform while she was a councillor).
  Welsh Labour’s Rebecca Francis-Davies held the Morriston seat, which had been vacated by her father, long-serving councillor Robert Francis-Davies.

• Conwy (2), June 19th: Two wards elected new councillors after Reform politicians Louise Emery and Thomas Montgomery were elected as MSs in May (though both were actually elected to the council as Tories before defecting.) Reform won the seats in both wards.

• Rhondda Cynon Taf (Treorchy), June 26th: Plaid’s Sera Evans held this seat previously before she was elected as an MS, and Plaid retained the seat ahead of Reform’s Craig Ford (who was formerly a Tory press officer who defected to Reform just before the byelection).

• Merthyr Tydfil (Dowlais and Pant), June 26th: Reform were defending this seat after David Hughes was elected to the Senedd, but lost out to Welsh Labour.

• Denbighshire (2), June 26th: Reform won a seat previously held by independent councillor Jeanette Chamberlain-Jones, who died in March. Reform’s newly-elected Tony Thomas is a former Tory councillor. The other seat, previously held by Plaid’s now-MS Elfed Williams, was won by independent Ian Evans.

• Carmarthenshire (2), June 26th: Reform were defending this after Carmelo Colasanto’s Senedd election, but lost out to Plaid.

People will be auto-registered to vote in next year’s elections

People in Wales will be automatically registered to vote in next year’s local elections.

New rules expected to be laid by the Welsh Gov this autumn mean local councils will be able to use data-matching to identify potential electors and add eligible people to their local electoral register.

This is a really good move which will hopefully help increase turnout at elections and allow people living in more deprived areas, who often face the biggest barriers in registering to vote, to participate in democracy.

New stats on attainment in reading and numeracy

The Welsh Government has just released new statistics on attainment in reading and numeracy based on our national tests, and they make for grim reading.

There remains a huge gap between how children eligible for free school meals (EFSM) are developing compared to their peers.

We won’t go through all the figures - you can find them here - but to give a few, in 2024/25 for Welsh reading the gap was:

• Year three: 35.2 months

• Year seven: 41.1 months

• Year eight: 45.4 months

For English reading in the same year:

• Year three: 14.8 months

• Year seven: 42.5 months

• Year eight: 31.9 months

In some cases, our most disadvantaged learners are more than three years behind their peers at a very young age.

New measures to tackle Betsi

On Tuesday the Welsh Government announced new efforts to address the situation at Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board.

Speaking in the Senedd, Health Minister Mabon ap Gwynfor announced the Welsh Gov would more directly intervene, saying previous efforts to support the health board in delivering change by itself had failed and that he was “fed up of ‘Betsi’ being a byword for dysfunction and declining standards, dragging the good name of the NHS and its hardworking staff down.”

Some of the measures he announced are:

• a team of operational and clinical experts to reduce long waits for cancer treatment, tackle ambulance handover delays and eliminate two year waits.

• “no second chances for those in positions of responsibility and authority.”

• a “full stock take” of the health board’s position including a review of its leadership, governance and culture, patient experience and the board, which will report back recommendations to the Minister by the end of October

• commissioning a joint review of the effectiveness of the current escalation and intervention framework within Plaid’s first 100 days

Mr ap Gwynfor said:

“The health board is on notice. This is the last chance that they have.”

We have covered the challenges at Betsi extensively in previous newsletters including a special report you can read here.

But we have also heard a lot of hollow words from previous ministers, that “real progress” and improvements had been happening. Eluned Morgan said only last year that governance issues at Betsi had now been sorted and that they were “breathing down their necks.” Millions of pounds have been poured in. The previous Welsh Gov even removed and replaced the board.

If the Welsh Gov are saying this is last chance saloon, they will be under real pressure for these new measures to work. Otherwise, what happens?

One of the issues with Betsi is that it is too big, and there has been talk previously about whether it should be split up. As a last resort, ministers can remove control from the health board, which hasn’t been ruled out.

Another Ken Skates film reference!

As a lighter aside, during his questioning of the Health Minister on Tuesday, Ken Skates referenced ‘This Is Spinal Tap’. It is the second film reference by the new Welsh Labour leader in his short tenure.

Maybe it’s time for us to start a Ken Skates Reference Watch?

‘I’m sure you didn’t mean to say this’

On Tuesday in the Senedd Lib Dems leader Jane Dodds was unhappy with the Counsel General Elfyn Llwyd after he referred to her as “the lady” during his response to her question about Powys patients waiting long periods for treatment.

Mr Llywyd did, in fairness, correct himself instantly to refer to Ms Dodds as “the member” instead, but she later replied:

“I’m sure you didn’t mean to say this, but you referred to me as ‘the lady’ and I really don’t find that acceptable.”

The Counsel General then apologised. Here’s the exchange:

The new-look Senedd is still bedding in…

As a newly-elected MS, there must have been a hell of a lot of new things to get your head around in the first few weeks.

Some members are still getting into the swing of how it all works in the chamber. On Tuesday, Plaid’s Anna Nicholl prompted good-hearted chuckles when she asked a supplementary question before she had even asked her original question.

When this was pointed out to her by the First Minister, she asked: “Has anybody got a copy of it?”

Earlier on, responding to comments from Dan Thomas that there had been “hints that there will be a full budget coming in the autumn”, Rhun ap Iorwerth quelled laughter by “dropping a bombshell” on Reform’s leader that tabling a budget is exactly what the Welsh Government does every year and is not exactly a guarded secret.

New bus between north and west Wales

A new bus service linking north and west Wales is being launched.

The new route will run daily between Bangor and Carmarthen stopping at Caernarfon, Porthmadog railway station, Dolgellau, Machynlleth, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth bus station, and Aberaeron.

Bus services are a lot quicker to roll out than rail, so a route that links some of these less well-connected areas is welcome.

We need to fund our hospices

People are being urged to write to their MSs to address a lack of funding for hospice care.

The Welsh Government are projecting a 27% rise in deaths and a 53.6% increase among people aged over 85 by 2040. Hospices are facing additional demand but do not currently have enough funding to increase their capacity.

Hospice UK and Hospices Cymru say funding to hospices by the last Welsh Government was increased by £25m, but that most of this was put towards NHS pay awards, cost of living pressures and National Insurance hikes.

They have called on the new administration to “urgently establish a sustainable, long‑term funding solution for hospice care in Wales.”

Find out more here about the campaign and the Hospice UK Senedd event ‘The Future of Palliative and Hospice Care in Wales’ on Tuesday 15 September.

The plan for Wales’ new surgical hubs

The Welsh Government have set up an elective care group to help deliver on their plans for new surgical hubs.

The new care hubs are being rolled out to increase capacity for planned surgery and diagnostics, reduce the number of people having their surgeries cancelled and help cut long waiting times by separating planned care from emergency pressures.

The elective care group is made up of senior surgeons, nurses, anaesthetists and operational leaders from across NHS Wales and will make recommendations by the end of the year.

The Welsh Gov say the hubs will be implemented and operationalised over the course of this Senedd term.

Mr ap Gwynfor said:

“This expert group will plan out how many elective care hubs we will need, where they will be based and how they will increase capacity in the system.

“We want planning for these hubs to be led by the people who know best — the surgeons, nurses and anaesthetists working on the front line every day.

“Their expertise will ensure we build a planned care system that is resilient, efficient and works for patients across Wales.”

Welsh union body appoints new secretary

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) Cymru, which co-ordinates trade unions in Wales, has appointed Laura Doel as its new General Secretary.

Laura Doel is a former journalist who has held a number of key roles and Welsh Government union positions. She is currently the National Secretary for Wales of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) and the current TUC Cymru President.

She will replace Shav Taj, who was elected to the Senedd for Welsh Labour following May’s election.

Ms Doel said:

“Wales is experiencing a moment of significant change, with a new government in place, continued pressures on pay-packets, and a world of work that is transformed compared to what has come before.

“The workers of Wales need to know that there is someone on their side and I look forward to taking up that challenge in the coming weeks.”

New support for domestic abuse victims

Domestic abuse specialists will be deployed to two 999 control rooms in Wales in a bid to improve support for victims.

The specialists will be deployed at Dyfed-Powys and North Wales Police as part of ‘Raneem’s Law’, launched under the UK Government’s Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy in memory of Raneem Oudeh and her mother Khaola Saleem, who were murdered by Raneem’s ex-husband in August 2018 despite multiple 999 calls to police who failed to turn up.

The specialists will oversee how calls for help are assessed and managed, provide real‑time advice to responding officers and call handlers to ensure victims are swiftly referred to specialist services.

Former Welsh MP admits betting on general election date

A former Welsh Tory MP has admitted to cheating at gambling by betting on when the last general election would be held.

Craig Williams was part of Rishi Sunak’s inner circle, serving as his private secretary while he was Prime Minister. On Monday Williams appeared in Southwark Crown Court which heard he “used highly sensitive and confidential information” to bet £250, £100, and £22.50 on the election date just days before it was called, the BBC reports.

Williams, who was MP for Montgomeryshire between 2019 and 2024, is among 15 people charged with betting offences by the Gambling Commission. He will be sentenced after his co-defendants, 12 of whom have denied the offences, stand trial in September 2027 and January 2028.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and please do consider becoming a paid subscriber. We can’t do this without you.

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Will and the newsletter team.

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“Calls on the Welsh Government to scrap the Nation of Sanctuary plan”.

It is perfectly legitimate for the opposition inside the Senedd to question public spending. It is literally their job.

However, it’s really important that we debate, discuss and make decisions based on facts and rooted firmly in reality.

This is a topic that really matters. Not just for the human beings impacted directly but because a functioning asylum system is of great benefit to Wales and the UK.

To put this piece together we have partnered with the Welsh Refugee Council to help you understand the issue.

The true picture of asylum in Wales

Reporting by Marcus Hughes

Let’s start with the numbers.

There are 3,308 people awaiting a decision on an asylum application living in Wales, according to the most recent figures released for May 2026.

That’s less than 4% of the 94,000 people seeking refuge who are dispersed around the wider United Kingdom - well below Wales’ population share.

As a proportion of Wales’ population, it’s about 0.1%. If you put every asylum seeker in Wales inside Penydarren Park (Merthyr Town FC’s ground), it would only be three quarters full.

The issue of people seeking asylum is literally a global problem.

The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates there were 117.8 million forcibly displaced people at the end of 2025. That’s up from 65.6 million people worldwide in 2016.

The UK is the fifth largest recipient of asylum seekers compared to the 27 EU member states, receiving about 10% of the total. But it’s worth bearing in mind that we are also second only to Germany when it comes to our total population. In terms of the number of asylum applications per head of population, the UK ranks 15th in Europe.

The number of people claiming asylum to the UK and the top 4 countries in the EU+

During the Senedd election this year, immigration, the asylum system, and Wales’ Nation of Sanctuary policy became priority topics of discussion for some parties.

In the opening weeks of the seventh Senedd, it has continued to be a dominant issue.

Today, Reform UK’s leader in Wales Dan Thomas has tabled a motion in the Senedd calling on the Welsh Government to scrap the Nation of Sanctuary plan.

Given this is an area that has inflamed some public debate recently, we felt it was time to take a deeper look at what the situation in Wales actually is, and what it’s like for the people who seek refuge in our country.

Why do people seek refuge in the UK?

People flee their countries and take refuge in another one for a host of complex reasons.

In the main part, it’s to distance themselves and/or their families from war, persecution or violence.

And there’s a lot of conflict currently happening in the world.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, there are 130 armed conflicts involving 60 countries, and 120 non-state armed groups ongoing worldwide at the moment.

Ukraine, Gaza/ Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, and Myanmar are key areas where war is leading to significant displacement of people.

In Sudan alone, 14 million people (or a quarter of the population) have been displaced in just three years.

You might be a young man, living in a country where tensions between groups are rising and you could be required to fight on a certain side. Rather than take up arms and potentially be forced to harm or even kill people, you might decide to leave at great personal risk.

You might be a woman, facing a life in a country where where you face serious persecution because of your sex or where you’re at risk of sexual violence, forced marriage or trafficking.

Increasingly, climate change is also becoming a factor (although isn’t recognised as grounds for refugee status alone). In every part of the world, changing weather patterns are making food production more difficult, and weather-related disasters more frequent. If food or water is scarce, it can cause greater conflict over those limited resources.

As a trend, the number of people experiencing forcible displacement globally is getting worse:

This issue isn’t going away, so we need to get it right.

What does someone seeking asylum in Wales actually get?

Someone arriving in a country claiming to need sanctuary from war or persecution is legally defined as “seeking asylum”.

People with that status are not allowed to work, so the Home Office provides a very small amount of money to cover the very basic needs of survival and they are given accommodation.

The individual or family doesn’t decide where they are placed, they’re sent wherever there is capacity and the decision is made by the Home Office. That may be Wales, but it could equally be anywhere from Cornwall to Glasgow.

In rare cases, the initial accommodation provides meals in which case the amount of money a person gets will drop to £9.95 a week. If you’re a pregnant mother, or have a child aged one to three, you get an extra £5.25 a week. If you have a baby under one you are given an extra £9.50 a week.

It is difficult to comprehend how little that money is to live on in Wales in 2026.

Accommodation for someone claiming asylum is again funded by the Home Office.

A private company called Clearsprings Ready Homes Ltd is the contracted supplier of all the accommodation in Wales and some in the south of England. Last year the company reported £90m in annual profits.

The concept of hotels being used as a form of temporary accommodation for those seeking refuge has proved divisive in recent years. But very few people are actually housed in this way in Wales. Most people are housed in what’s called dispersed private accommodation, across Wales’ 22 local authorities.

And it’s far from a luxury experience.

Meals are more likely to be provided in this sort of accommodation. Across the UK, concerns have been raised about the quality of what is on offer in that type of arrangement. There have been claims some of the food provided is poor quality, and doesn’t always cater properly for an individual’s dietary requirements.

And it also can lead to greater isolation. Being siloed into a hotel could limit your contact with people around you, making it more difficult to work on your language skills or create new links to the community where you’re now living.

It can take a year or more for an application to be processed. Only when an application is accepted does a person gain refugee status. That gives the person permission to stay (or leave to remain), and only then can they take on paid work or get access to the mainstream benefits system.

In the year to March 2026, 48,581 people were granted refugee protection or other leave at initial decision across the UK. It’s down from a peak of 67,678 in the year to March 2024, and remains high due to the increased number of claims being made.

This is what the figures look like for the UK:

So right now we have a system which:

• Stops people contributing to Welsh society

• Puts them in limbo for over a year

• Prevents them from integrating

• Leaves them isolated

These are the very issues that the Nation of Sanctuary is trying to deal with.

The Nation of Sanctuary and the issue it’s trying to address

Wales has no power to control asylum applications and as one of the four nations of the UK, it has to contribute to housing people.

The Labour Welsh Government introduced the Nation of Sanctuary plan with the aim of helping people who are granted leave to remain find employment and help them integrate as active members of society. Plaid and the Welsh Conservatives also spoke in support of the policy at the time.

Once someone has refugee status they have 42 days to find a place to live and secure their own form of income. This is an incredibly difficult barrier to overcome.

Many people who have spent their entire lives in the UK would struggle to secure those two things in 42 days from a standing start.

They would have to rent somewhere privately, which is getting very expensive. Recent estimates put the average cost of securing a rented property in Wales at £1,500 (taking into account deposits and first month rent). You’d have to secure that at the same time as finding a job after living on less than £50 a week for more than a year – it’s not easy.

Who is coming here?

The top six countries of origin of people seeking asylum in the UK are Pakistan, Eritrea, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sudan.

Many arrive with considerable skills that could be put to very effective use in Wales, and once integrated work hard to contribute to the society that has housed them.

But it’s not without challenges. Others arrive having lost years of education, qualifications that are not recognised in the UK, or carrying trauma that makes rebuilding a working life much harder.

Below are examples offered by the Welsh Refugee Council demonstrating some of the ways the Nation of Sanctuary plan has helped people prepare for working life while their application is ongoing. They say that they can avoid the cliff-edge of that 42-day window to gain employment and find independent accommodation.

Are refugees contributing to crime in Wales?

Recently, those seeking to criticise Wales’ approach to supporting refugees have pointed to high profile violent crimes committed by people from overseas.

In a question to the First Minister asking about “potential risks to public safety” of the Nation of Sanctuary scheme, Joe Martin MS referred to an attack in Belfast for which a Sudanese man has been arrested, and the murder of Rhiannon Whyte in Walsall.

There is very little research on the impact of refugees on crime rates in the UK. The UK Government doesn’t publish data on recorded crimes based on people’s asylum or refugee status.

There is therefore no evidential base to conclude refugees commit more crime than people born in the UK. Individual cases will inevitably attract a disproportionate amount of attention but it doesn’t mean they are representative.

There are, however, some wider studies looking at whether there is a link between immigration more generally and criminal behaviour. A 2013 study found no evidence of causal link in England and Wales and a report published in 2017 by Kent University suggested there could be a link between falling crime rates and waves of immigration.

The Oxford University Migration Observatory found that compared to people born in the UK, migrants are more likely to be of working age and have a university degree.

Whether we have a Nation of Sanctuary plan or not – Wales will still have to house refugees

There are two reasons the UK, and Wales as one of its four nations, is obligated to accept people who seek refuge, regardless of whether we pursue the Nation of Sanctuary plan or not.

The first is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that enshrines the right to seek asylum. It was adopted by the UN in the aftermath of the Second World War to prevent a repeat of the sorts of atrocities millions of people had just experienced, like the Holocaust, and established a global standard of basic freedoms and dignity for every individual.

The second is the 1951 Refugee Convention, of which 149 countries are party to including the UK. The convention outlines basic minimum standards for the treatment of refugees, including rights to housing, work and education while displaced. It is enforceable under international law.

The Welsh Government has no power to back out of this. The UK Government alone holds the power to change policies around asylum and refugees.

Since its inception in 2019 to 2025, when the most up to date figures are available, the net cost of the Nation of Sanctuary has been just under £64 million.

Around £4 million over six years was spent on the wider support and integration services for asylum seekers and refugees, including:

• Wales Sanctuary Service - Delivered by the Welsh Refugee Council to help give people advice on things like housing and their rights.

• English language support - To aid integration and help people be prepared for work.

• Pathways into further education and work.

£64 million represents 0.05% of the Welsh Government’s budget over that period.

If they are effectively integrated into a community, establishing friendships and bonds with local groups, schools, and neighbourhoods, it cuts down on the sorts of social problems that can cause issues for everyone.

But whether or not Wales should be spending money on supporting people who settle here, returning 0.05% of the budget back to the Welsh Government will not make a meaningful difference to the delivery of public services in Wales.

If you are worried about asylum seekers, you should support the Nation of Sanctuary policy

In simple terms, if you are concerned about refugees because you think they won’t integrate, learn English or Cymraeg, contribute or be useful to Welsh society, then the Nation of Sanctuary is literally designed to tackle these concerns.

Thanks for reading and to the Welsh Refugee Council for working with us on this. You can find out more about their work here.

Take care and we will see you later today for a stacked midweek briefing.

The Newsletter Team

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

In the coming weeks we have some deep dive pieces we have been working on. As some of those will be…well…deep, I wanted to do something a bit more lighthearted today.

We are at the halfway point of the year. In January I made some predictions for what would happen in Welsh politics over 2026. You can read them here.

Many of them have come true. Many of them have made me look a bit of an idiot. But I think they are a useful tool for exploring where we are in Welsh politics right now and where we might be going. So we are going to look at how I have done so far and give a grade for each one.

I have also included several reader predictions from January to see how you all measure up…

Those of you who have been with me since the start will know all about Hello Starling. They are media planning and buying specialists.

These guys are experts at getting your product in front of people. I can’t speak highly enough of them. Getting people to sign up for a newsletter about Welsh politics is a difficult task but they have been instrumental in helping the newsletter grow.

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Predictions

“A Reform/Plaid dominated Senedd”

Back at New Year I predicted that the Senedd would be dominated by Reform and Plaid. In the election they got 80% of the seats.

Not the boldest prediction ever but not a bad start. I also made seat predictions. The number in bold is what I predicted and the number next to it is what actually happened:

• Plaid: 40 (43)

• Reform: 38 (34)

• Labour: 8 (9)

• Conservative 4 (7)

• Green 4 (2)

• Lib Dems 2 (1)

So I was furthest off when it came to Reform, who I overestimated. I thought they would take more Tory votes (though they took a lot). I am most pleased with the Labour prediction because at the time I got a lot of pushback for putting them in single figures. With the Greens and Lib Dems, it’s hard to predict when people are battling for 6th seats because the margin of victory is often very tight.

My rationale for Plaid and Reform doing so well was:

It will be in the interests of both Plaid and Reform to portray the election as a battle between the two of them. Both will want to push the idea that a vote for anyone besides them is a vote for the other. This will be an especially powerful message for Plaid and I believe it will mean many people who aren’t that enamoured with Plaid will give them their vote.

Grade: B

“Rhun ap Iorwerth is First Minister in a minority government”

Yes, I got this one spot on but let’s face it, it was the most likely scenario, so I can’t feel smug.

There were so many results that could lead to this eventuality. Some (like the one we have) are a categorical win for Plaid while there were other scenarios where Reform were easily the biggest party but Rhun ap Iorwerth still FM.

Grade: A (but not an impressive A)

“Eluned Morgan loses seat”

Again, file this one under “correct but obvious.”

Grade: A

“By the end of the year Plaid and Labour will have a formal agreement”

Clearly this hasn’t happened yet but I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility.

Much will depend on how hard Plaid are finding it to get legislation passed and whether they want the security of knowing they have the votes to push their agenda.

It will also depend on who is leading both UK and Welsh Labour. If it’s Burnham and Skates respectively, it will be interesting to see how Labour position themselves.

Neither Plaid nor Labour really want to work together, so I think it will be unlikely. I would give it a 20% chance.

Grade: TBC

“A short-lived bromance will flourish between Rhun ap Iorwerth and Andy Burnham”

On January the 1st I wrote:

All of these things look set to happen. So the pieces are all in place.

I am quietly confident that this prediction will play out. My rationale is the same as it was six months ago, when I said:

If this were to happen, you would have a Prime Minister who has risen to prominence running a devolved administration. Mr Burnham has experience running a part of the UK away from Westminster. He is likely to be far more disposed to devolution in principle than the eternally London/England-focused Keir Starmer.

The UK Labour Party would also be reeling after getting smashed in Wales and have 27 Welsh Labour MPs who are crapping themselves about what will happen in a General Election. There will be significant pressure on the new PM to win back Welsh support and I can see him not wanting to pick a fight with Mr ap Iorwerth (at least to start with).

By the same token, Mr ap Iorwerth will be desperate to achieve some demonstrable successes early in his administration and so will be trying to cultivate (at least to start with) a good relationship with Mr Burnham.

Grade: TBC

“Matthew Mackinnon or Mark Reckless will be named Reform’s Welsh leader”

Urgh, this was a massive swing and a miss. Not only did neither man become Reform’s leader in Wales, neither are even MSs.

Mackinnon didn’t even run while Reckless was Reform’s second placed candidate on their list for the Caerdydd Penarth constituency where they only won one seat (Joseph Martin, the man giving the “banter” speeches in the Senedd last week). Reckless would now only become an MS if Joe Martin dies or resigns.

There is no way to spin it, I was miles off with this one. My only defence is that I had literally never heard of Dan Thomas before he was announced as leader (to be fair, neither had most of the Reform candidates).

Grade: F

“A prominent Reform person defects to Tories before the election”

Ok, this didn’t happen. I am clearly not Nostradamus. But I wasn’t far off.

Back in January I said:

“As we get towards the end of March Reform will have to name their party lists. This will not be a democratic process. Nigel Farage will intervene to put his picked men (I promise you they will nearly all be men except for Laura Anne Jones), at the top of the list. This will send some Welsh Reform hopefuls into a fury.

“I predict that someone with great ambition will end up 4th on a list. Realising that they have almost no chance of being elected they will throw their toys out of the pram and, desperate for their 30 seconds of attention, will publicly defect to the Tories (and forgo their spot on the list).”

This was so nearly a glorious prediction:

• It was not a democratic process (candidate selection, parachuting in, lists repeatedly changing).

• Farage’s picks were overwhelmingly at the top of all the lists.

• It was male dominated.

• Laura Anne Jones was at the top.

• Grassroots hopefuls did go into a frenzy.

We even had Owain Clatworthy, selected in sixth place on the list in Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg, quit, saying:

“Recent events, including poor internal decision making, a lack of discipline and serious concerns around candidate selection, have made it clear to me that Reform UK is no longer operating in a way that reflects the standards I believe the public deserve”.

Alas, he didn’t defect to the Tories. Instead he endorsed former Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies and then announced he was defecting to Restore Britain.

So close, yet so far.

As an aside, there is a parallel universe where Restore Britain ran in the Senedd election and Reform UK ended up with just 20 MSs. If Restore had stood candidates and taken just 2% of Reform’s vote, then Reform would have missed out on some of their 6th seats.

Grade: D minus

“Reform loses a third for their MSs within a year…”

Clearly we won’t know if this is right until next May but I still have a decent level of confidence in this for two reasons:

• Growing divides. From conversations I have had with Reform MSs, there are already multiple divides within the group within the Senedd. There is a sizable contingent who are disgruntled with the Farage inner circle around Llyr Powell. Staff are already feeling overlooked by leader Dan Thomas. There is also growing discontent among some of the sensible wing of the group who want to crack on with proper opposition and are not keen to simply aim for social media soundbites.

• The temptation of Restore. We have spoken before about the financial benefits for a group of Reform MSs defecting. The cash that would bring for the new leader of a political group is significant.

Grade: TBC

“Turnout will top 50% for the 1st time ever”

Turnout in the Senedd election was 51.6%, up five percentage points from 2021.

Grade: A

“Andrew RT Davies becomes Welsh Tory leader again”

This one could still happen but I don’t think it will.

At the start of 2026 I said:

“If the Tories end up with just a handful of MSs, Darren Millar’s position could be untenable. We know his heart isn’t really in it anyway (he ran to be an MP in 2024, had another job while being leader and missed key votes to hobnob in USA). If he does step down or lose his seat, there will be an opening…”

I think this scenario could only really have played out if Mr Davies had been one of two or three MSs. Otherwise, there are simply too many people who have seen him as leader before (twice) and are just not into it.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a frustration with Darren Millar’s leadership of the group and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was gone this time next year. I just don’t think RT will be the one to replace him.

I did also make a howler in this prediction. At the time I added:

“If Mr Millar doesn’t step down straight after the election, I predict Tom Giffard will be the next leader whenever the time comes.”

Mr Giffard lost his seat.

Grade: D

“All parties will grossly misrepresent the electoral situation in their areas”

It was disappointing how right I was about this. Every party except Reform put out messaging saying “only we can beat Reform in this area”. The extent to which the parties tried to take advantage of the fact people didn’t understand the new system shows how quickly winning replaces principles in the heat of a campaign.

I personally had eight leaflets through the door saying it was a “battle between us and Reform here”. We also had some bizarre posts like the Tories’ Natasha Asghar telling people to bring voter ID (which you didn’t need).

Grade: A+

Reader predictions!

When I published my original piece at the start of January I asked readers for their predictions as well.

I am proud (but also annoyed) to say many of them are better than me at predicting Welsh politics:

Read more

Hello and welcome to heat hell,

I was tempted to change this newsletter from Wales Watching to “Gobi Gazing”, “Desert Dissection” or “Sahara Studying”.

There is plenty going on this week. I have been down the Senedd speaking to people from all parties, and it’s becoming clearer how they are planning to operate as the dust settles post-election. Let’s get into that, Starmer stepping down and plenty of other Welsh news.

We are going to have a new PM

In all likelihood, it looks like Andy Burnham is going to be our next Prime Minister. There will be many words written elsewhere about this and the point of this newsletter is Welsh-specific analysis, so I will make the following points on both Starmer/Burnham and Wales:

Keir Starmer

• Failed to read the warning signs from Wales from the start. In the 2024 election Wales was the only part of the UK where the Labour vote share went down. Rather than taking that as the huge red flag it was, the PM instead looked at the constituency maps of Wales and saw that 27/32 Welsh seats were red, and took it for granted.

• Starmer’s messaging on Wales was utterly disdainful. Whether it was repeatedly calling Eluned Morgan “Eleanor” (I heard him do this on two occasions) or literally sending memos to his cabinet telling them not to be “overly deferential” to the devolved government, Starmer was abject when it came to messaging on Wales. Perhaps nothing underscores his administration’s attitude like when senior minister Darren Jones said Wales “might want to be a bit more grateful” for funding it received.

• He will always be the man who lost Wales. Over the last 48 hours there have been attempts to secure a positive narrative and legacy around Starmer’s term. Some of it is perfectly fair. Was he dealt a tough hand? 100%. Did he turn Labour around after a huge defeat? Definitely. Was the social media algorithm against him from the start? Absolutely.

  But the fact remains he is the first UK Labour leader in literally 100 years to lose in Wales in a devolved or general election. It was obvious to everyone that demonstrable concessions for Wales would be needed to keep Labour in power here. It was also obvious to most people that Wales was being screwed over when it came to funding (not just my words, the words of UK Labour before they were in power).

  But can anyone really make the argument that Starmer and his team left no stone unturned when it came to keeping Wales? The reason they lost Wales was, more than anything else, down to their own complacent apathy.

Andy Burnham

With all the caveats that we ultimately don’t know what a Burnham PM will be like, we can say:

• He has a totally different mindset when it comes to devolution. Burnham ran a devolved administration for a long time. Whereas Johnson and Truss saw devolved governments as unacceptable separate power centres and Starmer more often viewed them as bureaucratic layers to be navigated, Burnham is likely to treat devolution for what it is - a potentially invaluable tool for delivering prosperity more equitably across the UK (if we can resource it right).

• He is supportive of the Gordon Brown report. Back in 2022, Gordon Brown wrote a report on the future of devolution and how to strengthen it. A key part of that, in a Wales context, was the principle that anything devolved to Scotland could be devolved to Wales if the Senedd wanted it. Mark Drakeford told me he believes that Burnham will be using this as his blueprint if he becomes PM. If this is true, it will be an enormous change in mentality compared to the last seven years.

We will bring additional analysis of this in the coming weeks.

Some more context to the Senedd walkout

On Sunday we discussed the walkout in the Senedd last week following a series of Reform speeches.

That is still a serious point of discussion among the parties and MSs. There are a few points I would add to the analysis at the weekend:

• There are conversations happening within parties on the left in the Senedd about how best they combat divisive rhetoric from Reform. I would be surprised if walkouts became the norm.

• It was a highly emotional environment in the Senedd that day. Walking out was not planned, it was in part triggered partly as a show of solidarity with one member who left.

• There is anger with the Llywydd. Some MSs have expressed concern that the new speaker Huw Irranca-Davies isn’t setting high enough standards when it comes to the level of discourse in the chamber.

• The current Senedd is highly inexperienced when it comes to its members. Most people inside the chamber have not done the job before and many haven’t been close to roles of this intensity, scrutiny or salary. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing - change doesn’t happen if everything stays the same. However, it is likely, at least initially, to create a more chaotic vibe within the Senedd.

The Tories’ new strategy

The significantly diminished Tory group in the Senedd is looking to refocus in terms of their messaging. Having gone from the official opposition to the fourth largest party, they do not have the profile or the number of questions they previously enjoyed.

There is a conscious decision within the Tory group to position themselves as the “adults in the room” compared to Reform. They are hoping to strike a more sensible tone which will pivot from opposing for opposing’s sake to offering more nuanced and targeted scrutiny of the Welsh Gov.

Climate change makes its presence felt

This morning I made the following point on social media:

It was good to see the likes of Welsh Lib Dem leader Jane Dodds and Green leader Anthony Slaughter point out the obvious link between climate change and the current deadly heat in the Senedd.

Mr Slaughter said:

Extreme heat is a social justice issue. We must not leave behind vulnerable and low-income people who will feel the impacts of climate change more acutely. This includes children, whose lives are already being impacted and fundamentally reshaped.

Governments across the UK have dragged their heels for too long; the science is clear. It’s time to end our fossil fuel addiction once and for all. We need meaningful action to address the climate crisis and respond to the immediacy of this untenable situation.

If you have family, friends and acquaintances who are still sceptical about climate change, I will leave with you with this graph you can show them:

Why new blood matters

Watching Senedd contributions since the election, there is a powerful lesson to be learned for Welsh Labour - the value of renewal and new blood.

Welsh Labour only have two MSs who are new to the Senedd - Shav Taj and Huw Thomas.

Both have been the standout performers for Labour since the new term began. Ms Taj has delivered some powerful speeches, as well as being an energetic social media presence. Huw Thomas has made some insightful spontaneous Senedd contributions where he has challenged assertions on the fly. Many MSs struggle with this.

I am not saying that either of these two will end up being great MSs. I have no idea. But it shows how the act of renewal can inject new energy into a political group/party and what a missed opportunity it has been for Welsh Labour to allow good talent to wither on the vine while others occupy the same chair for decades.

Understanding what happened to Labour

For those of you who want a more academic deep dive into Welsh Labour to understand what happened in the Senedd election, Professor Richard Wyn Jones from Cardiff Uni’s Wales Governance Centre has written this guest article for the newsletter looking at what the data tells us about Labour’ decline.

Senedd backs lobbyist register

A motion calling for a new statutory lobbyists register put forward by Reform last week gained cross-party support and was agreed by the new Senedd.

Lobbying is the practice of attempting to persuade politicians to support legislation that works in favour of a certain group. It can be carried out by companies, charities, trade unions, or any individual or private citizen.

It is a normal part of the democratic process and isn’t in itself sinister. Politicians need to be able to listen to interested parties to understand the impacts of their actions, or lack of, in public office.

But problems can arise if that happens in secret. Lack of transparency makes it difficult to know who is influencing the government. Without a public log of who is meeting with decision-makers, smaller groups who lack financial resources and connections might lose their ability to counter the lobbying of more powerful actors.

The Senedd doesn’t have a lobbyist register and it’s peculiar it’s taken this long to formally agree that it should. The UK parliament does. The Scottish parliament does. In Northern Ireland ministers and special advisers have to keep a log of any lobbying they receive.

Reform’s motion was agreed without amendment with 77 in favour, no abstentions, and eight against.

Another day, another flag

Flags are still on the minds of the official Senedd opposition.

During a flag raising event to mark Armed Forces week, Newport Labour claimed Reform’s leader in Wales Dan Thomas took aim at the Pride flag currently flying outside the Senedd.

In a post on Facebook, the party said: “Reform’s leader in Wales, in a passing comment, said to one of our councillors that we should take down the Pride flag that’s flying outside the civic centre for Pride month.”

The Labour-led council said it has no plans to remove the flag and said: “We are a proud, inclusive city that celebrates all of our residents.”

We asked Reform UK for comment but we didn’t receive a response.

Brexit is nearly old enough for secondary school

Yesterday marked 10 years since the European referendum.

Speaking on the 10th anniversary, Plaid MP Liz Saville Roberts said the country has “experienced significant political and economic instability” as a result of Brexit, and the party claims the Welsh economy has taken a £4bn hit as a result.

It appears there’s been a change of heart in Wales - a YouGov poll published last week suggested that 61% of people in Wales believe that Britain was wrong to vote to leave the EU.

Wales’ import and export destinations

Sometimes we just like to share things that are fundamentally interesting.

This piece by Senedd Research had some really interesting data on Wales’ international trade (I recommend you check out Senedd Research because they have been hitting it out of the park lately).

Here are two really cool graphics from them:

Wales’s top five exports (by category and value; 2025):

Wales’s biggest single export falls within the ‘machinery and transport equipment’ category and is ‘power generating machinery and equipment’. This includes products such as turbines and generators, which account for £4.3bn of the £9.3bn.

Wales’s top five imports:

Wales’s biggest single import falls within the ‘mineral fuels, lubricants etc’ category and is ‘petroleum, petroleum products and related materials’. These products account for £4.8bn of the £5.1bn.

Some worrying signs for gender equality in Wales

A new report has warned that progress on gender equality in Wales has stalled. The 2026 ‘State of the Nation’ report, published by Women’s Equality Network (WEN), has found that despite years of commitments and initiatives, women across Wales have seen only limited improvements since the first report was published in 2018.

Among its key findings are that, since then:

• The gender pay gap in Wales increased to 9.7%, with significant local disparities (e.g. from a negative gender pay gap of -6% in Gwynedd to 26% in Flintshire).

• Women’s economic activity and employment rates have declined, with disabled and ethnic minority women facing even greater barriers.

• Representation in leadership remains fragile: Women now make up 46% of Senedd members, this relies on voluntary party initiatives and varies greatly across parties. In local government, the situation is worse - only 23% of council leaders are women.

• Gender-based violence is at crisis levels: Over 80% of sexual assault cases and nearly three-quarters of domestic abuse-related offences are committed against women. For the first time, more new refuge referrals were refused than admitted.

• Single parent households, more likely to be headed by women, saw poverty rates jump from 39% to 45%. Women make up almost 60% of Universal Credit claimants.

The report called for action on improving affordable childcare, addressing the barriers to women entering employment, tackling violence against women and improving representation of women in leadership roles. You can read the full report here.

WEN Wales CEO Anna Brown said:

“Wales stands at a critical moment. Without a fundamental shift in ambition and resources, we risk locking in inequality for yet another generation of women. The new Welsh Government must act decisively to make Wales a world leader on gender equality.”

That’s all for today. Hope you all manage to stay as cool as possible.

Thanks for the support. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Without paying subscribers, we can’t conduct this kind of Welsh specific journalism.

Will

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

He has written extensively on what underpins Welsh Labour’s recent decline in Wales and has penned this guest article looking at the issue.

I hope you enjoy the piece. Additionally you can also watch this video from him and friend of the newsletter Dr Jac Larner where they breakdown details of the Senedd election results.

Welsh Labour and the end of hegemony

By Prof Richard Wyn Jones

On the 7^th of May Wales experienced its first ‘change election’ in my lifetime. It was also the first change election in Wales during the lifetimes of my parents, born in 1937 and 1940 respectively. We can go even further: neither did my longest surviving grandparent – who was born in 1907 and died in 1999 – ever get the opportunity to vote in a change election in Wales as he was too young to vote in the 1922 general election. Yes, until a few weeks ago, that was the year of our most recent change election; the year when Labour began its still unbroken series of 28 consecutive general election victories in Wales!

I mention all this as one way of trying to convey the sheer novelty of what has just occurred. And of course, it’s not simply that has Labour has lost its first national election in Wales for over a century. Wales’ long-dominant party has just been utterly humiliated by its electorate.

By one of those cosmic coincidences, the Senedd election took place just over 60 years since the high-water mark of Labour’s electoral dominance in Wales. In the 1966 UK General Election the party secured over 60% of the popular vote across Wales, winning all bar 4 of the country’s 36 constituencies. In 2026 it won 11%. Thanks to a proportional voting system and the expansion of the Senedd from 60 to 96 members, that was enough to secure 9 seats. However, had a UK general election had been held in Wales on the 7^th of May then – based on the Westminster Voting Intention figures polled in Wales in the same week – Labour would not have won a single seat. In fact, the party wouldn’t even have come close. How the mighty have fallen.

There are of course a lot of caveats that need to be entered here. I’m certainly not claiming that this will be Labour’s fate in Wales when the next UK general election is held. But, with Labour having finished in a poor third place after both Plaid Cymru (on 35%) and Reform UK (on 29%) in a national election featuring a turnout, at 52%, that was broadly comparable to the 56% that voted in 2024 UK general election in Wales, it is nonetheless clear that the era of one-party dominance of Welsh electoral politics has come to an end – and with it the end of Labour hegemony.

The concept of hegemony is associated with the work of the Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. One of the people to introduce the ideas of Gramsci to the English-speaking world was the wonderfully charismatic Welsh historian Gwyn A. Williams. In a pioneering 1960 article Williams explained Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in the following terms:

a socio-political…order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society…informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotation. (1)

A quarter of a century later, in what became his most celebrated book – the Gramsci-infused When was Wales? – Williams referred to Labour as being the hegemonic force in post-1922 Wales. He was right.

As if its feat in winning election after election for decade after decade was not enough, Labour was much more than Wales’s dominant political party in electoral terms. It parlayed its political leadership into cultural and even moral leadership in Wales. Labour values came to be regarded as synonymous with the very core of Welsh identity itself. Or in other words, Welsh Labour begat Labour Wales. This is why the end of Labour dominance is set to mean so much more than a very different colour scheme on the nation’s electoral map. It will inevitably entail a potentially radical revision of our very identity, our culture, our values, and therefore our sense of our place in the world.

In what follows I will explore the reasons for the collapse of Labour hegemony. Inevitably, any conclusions must remain tentative. Much of the history of the internal machinations within the Labour Party over recent years remains unwritten or at least unpublished. Moreover, while Jac Larner and other Cardiff University Wales Governance Centre colleagues have presented some initial analysis of the Senedd election result, there is also much more work to be done in this regard. (2) It is also inevitably the case that our perceptions of the significance of the 2026 Senedd election will continue to be shaped and reshaped by future developments in Welsh and UK politics, and particularly the future trajectory of the Labour Party in Wales. Nonetheless, even at this preliminary stage, it is useful to try to provide an accounting of this extraordinary moment in Welsh and wider UK politics, if only as a foil for the development of alternative analyses.

The analysis will be divided into three broad themes, namely:

1. Social change;

2. Government and the ‘cost of governing’; and

3. Ideology and policy.

It should be stressed, however, that all of these are interlinked in complex ways. They are treated separately here simply as an aid to clarity.

Social change

The Labour Party in Wales is suffering from the consequences of those same social changes that have afflicted every northern European centre-left party, be that in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, or elsewhere. Bolstered by the structuring effect of Westminster’s ‘first past the post’ electoral system on party competition, Labour may have been able to resist the impact of these negative effects for longer than most. But who can now doubt that a tipping point has been reached?

These social changes as well as their political impacts will be broadly familiar. Deindustrialisation leading to the decline of the ‘traditional’ working class and the de-coupling of left-wing beliefs from what remains of the labour movement. The rapid growth in the proportion of the workforce with a university degree shifting a large section of society in a decidedly socially liberal direction. As a result, we’ve seen the growth of the so-called Nordic Left parties as well as Green parties – parties that tend to stand to the left of and be more socially liberal than the traditionally dominant Social Democratic and Labour parties. We have also seen a fracturing on the opposite side of the political spectrum with traditional Conservative or Christian Democratic parties facing challenges from the populist right. The latter differ from their staid, ‘bourgeois’ competitors by being more socially conservative and even authoritarian, but also – often – by being less orthodox in terms of their adherence to right wing economic dogma.

All this can readily be read across into the Welsh context. No one can be unaware that Wales is a country that has experienced a massive, deeply destructive process of economic restructuring that has fundamentally transformed patterns of employment and associated social structures (see Figure 1). I won’t seek to discuss these changes here, although – for the uninitiated – it is worth underlining that some of the most familiar cliches about Wales and Welsh society were once upon a time firmly based in socio-economic reality. In 1921, that is the year before our last but one change election, there were 270,000 colliers in Wales. With their families, they accounted for some four in every ten of the country’s population.

It is, however, worth pausing over a Wales-specific story of demographic change that has served to further undermine Labour support. For Welsh Labour was always more than a traditional centre left party drawing on the votes of the working class. Rather, the earliest political science forays into understanding voting behaviour in Wales were prompted by the realisation that, in Wales, Labour performed more strongly than the class profile of Welsh society would have led us to expect.

Subsequent research ended up attributing this ‘difference’ to the role of Welsh national identity both in priming voters to support Labour but also in acting to limit support for the Conservative party. (3) Indeed, the strongest version of the argument is that Welsh national identity has been constructed, in part at least, against the Tories – an argument that will be completely unsurprising to historians interested in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Wales.

How precisely to characterise Welsh Labour in its glory days is a moot point and one that has not really received the scholarly attention it deserved. The party’s support base straddled both class and nation. Although, it seems more apposite to suggest that was in turn a reflection of the way in which class and national narratives intertwine in Wales – doing so in ways familiar from the context of other stateless or formerly stateless nations across Europe. The impact of all this was arguably to make Welsh Labour a ‘catch all party’, to utilise the term popularised by Otto Kirchheimer back in the 1950s, with all the ideological hedging and ambiguity that characterises such parties. In this sense, whatever its self-image, there’s a plausible argument that Welsh Labour was always more akin to Ireland’s Fianna Fáil than Sweden’s Social Democrats.

This matters for at least three reasons. First, there does not seem to be the same taboo on voting for Reform and its predecessor parties among those with a dual Welsh-British identity as remains the case for voting for the Conservatives. Thus, the replacement of the latter by the former is especially challenging for Labour who can no-longer rely on Welsh anti-Tory inoculation to protect its right flank.

Second and more generally, as a result of two inter-related developments, Wales is becoming less British.

1. Younger people, in particular, are less likely to identify as British, tending rather to identify as exclusively Welsh. This phenomenon has long been observed in Scotland and has been attributed to the break-down of the British ‘welfare state nationalism’ that characterised the immediate post-Second World War period. The same phenomenon is observable in Wales too, and the same explanation appears plausible.

2. More proximately, Brexit has had a further destabilising influence on British national identity in Wales. In the wake of the 2016 referendum result, Remainers who had previously identified as Welsh and British have abandoned a British identity while those Remainers who identified as British or British and English appear to be eschewing any sense of strong national identity.

Third and finally, not only are social and economic values in Wales closely aligned to patterns of national identity, but those differences have become more polarised in the decade since the Brexit referendum (as illustrated in Figure 2). Thus, by now, those who feel Welsh but not British are significantly more left wing and socially liberal than those who feel both Welsh and British. They also tend to have rather different views of the polity, with the exclusively Welsh now tending to be very supportive of levels of home rule extending to full independence as well as being profoundly pro-European.

Figure 2: National Identities and Social and Economic Values in Wales, 2016-2026

Looking to the party’s progressive flank, the combination of developments two and three – Wales becoming less British and the polarisation of economic and social values, as well as constitutional attitudes associated with national identity – have had very serious implications for Labour. If the core elements of Labour’s electoral coalition was previously a combination of those who identified as Welsh only, those who identified as Welsh and British, and those people born in England living in Wales who identify as British only, then not only has the relative size of those groups changed, but they are also increasingly distant from each other in ideological terms. In such a context, ‘catching-all’ would appear to be nigh on impossible.

Government and the ‘cost of governing’

In political science terms, Welsh Labour has paid the ‘cost of governing’. It has long been recognised that the longer any party is in power, the more likely it is to disappoint some section or other of its erstwhile supporter base. All things being equal, therefore, governing parties can therefore be expected to lose support over time. Given that Labour was in power at the devolved level in Wales for 27 years, it should therefore come as no surprise it ended up becoming very unpopular. This is especially the case in a context in which few would regard Welsh Government’s record as being particularly distinguished.

As if this were not enough it itself, Labour’s standing in Wales was further diminished by the existence of a very, very unpopular Labour Government in power at the UK level, led by a Prime Minister in Sir Keir Starmer whose polling figures are the worst ever recorded for a Prime Minister in Wales. The result is that Labour in Wales has been caught in an incumbency ‘double whammy’ of frightening proportions. In recent years, Labour’s preferred slogan in Wales has been ‘two governments working in harmony’. In reality, it’s been two governments working not particularly harmoniously, both of which have managed to thoroughly alienate Labour’s electoral base.

Yet, attributing Welsh Labour’s current travails to the inevitable workings of political gravity – what goes up must come down, so to speak – seems insufficient. After all, in May 2023, at 36%, Labour was polling exactly twice the number then being projected for Plaid Cymru (18%). A year later, Labour was still polling 30% of the vote – just under 3 times its final Senedd total. Labour’s decline does not, therefore, reflect the outworkings of some kind of gradual process of creeping disillusionment. It rather appears to have been a far more precipitate decline than that: a collapse rather than a slow slide. There is more to explain. The following points may help us explain the puzzle.

Blame shifting. When the Conservatives were in power at the UK level between 2010 and 2024, Welsh Labour were adept at ‘blame-shifting’. Policy failures in Wales were attributed to the Tory government in London. We might suggest that this is a view that large parts of the traditionally anti-Conservative Welsh electorate were pre-disposed to accept. Certainly, survey evidence from this period suggests that large parts of the Welsh electorate – especially those who identify as Welsh – tended to blame ‘London’ for poor outcomes in areas of devolved responsibility. The same voters were even willing to credit the Welsh Government for what they perceived as positive policy outcomes in areas that did not fall under its responsibility. While not a great situation for those who of us who care about democratic accountability, it was about as good as it gets if you were a member of the then Welsh Government! But of course, blame shifting became substantially trickier after the formation of a UK Labour Government – especially in a context in which Welsh Labour has become deeply reluctant to differentiate the Welsh and UK Labour identities (a point to which I return below.)

Covid. It has become a truism to point out that every government in every developed country that led its population through the Covid pandemic has subsequently suffered a serious loss of popularity. Welsh Labour is certainly no exception from this more general pattern. Work by my Cardiff colleague Stephen Cushion also suggests that the experience of Covid pandemic served to give the Welsh population a crash course in the extent of devolved powers and responsibilities – something about which knowledge was, until the pandemic, notably vague. As such, Covid may well have served to render ‘blame shifting’ a far more difficult endeavour than had previously been the case.

Blame shifting as ‘expectation generation’. Welsh Labour blame shifting was also, inevitably, an exercise in what we might term ‘expectation generation’. The Welsh electorate were told not only that it was the UK Conservative Government’s fault that outcomes in Welsh public services were not what they might wish for – because of Conservative austerity, because of an unfair funding mechanism, and the rest. More than that, both implicitly and explicitly, they were led to believe that the election of a Labour government at the UK level would have a transformative effect in Wales; and not only on the ability of the Welsh Government to deliver but also on its general status and standing, which had been under attack, especially after the formation of Johnson administration in 2019.

But while this may have been the view of leading figures in the Welsh Government, this was clearly not the view of the Welsh Parliamentary Labour Party or the new UK Government itself. Thus, the expectations generated over those 14 long years of Conservative rule have been dashed. Not only has there been vanishingly little ‘pork’ in evidence – to use the parlance of US politics – but even obvious injustices / anomalies have not been addressed, with rail infrastructure spending providing the paradigmatic example. Moreover, far from objecting to this treatment, the Westminster-based faction of the Welsh Labour party would appear to be actively revelling in it, even though – in terms of rational electoral calculation – it would appear to damage their own future election prospects. To understand this, we turn finally to ideology and policy.

Ideology and policy

The end of Labour hegemony has coinciding with the collapse of the ‘Welsh Labour’ project, by which I mean the attempt to portray the party in Wales as embodying distinctively Welsh views and values; a project which we associate with First Ministers Rhodri Morgan, Carwyn Jones and Mark Drakeford.

It has long been recognised that parties prosper at the substate level by portraying themselves and the champions of the region, rather than the tribunes of the centre. This was exactly the approach crystalised in the Welsh Labour slogan ‘standing up for Wales’ and it proved an extremely successful one. Public attitudes data suggest that voters in Wales did indeed differentiate between British and Welsh Labour and were more positively disposed towards the latter than the former. Moreover, this was more than a winning formula at the devolved level only. There is also evidence that it proved helpful in electoral terms at the Westminster level: consider, for example, the prominence afforded to Carwyn Jones in Labour’s campaign in Wales at the time of the 2017 UK general election.

Yet, when in December 2023 Mark Drakeford announced his intention to stand aside as First Minister, it soon became clear how shallow the wider party’s commitment to this project really was. Vaughan Gething was narrowly elected as successor in March 2024. He was the least ‘Welsh Labour’ aligned of the two candidates on offer. Relatedly, he was also the choice of the party establishment including an overwhelming majority of the Welsh PLP. Gething’s victory was overshadowed by his willingness to accept a (in Welsh terms) very large and hugely contentious donation to fund his campaign. The ensuing controversy was such as to force his resignation soon after the UK general election in July of the same year. He was succeeded in short order by Eluned Morgan, a Gething supporter whose cabinet was in turn dominated other Gething supporters. This was a continuity Gething government. Morgan followed her immediate predecessor’s lead by rolling back on previous attempts to differentiate the Welsh from the UK Labour brands. Welsh and UK Labour were separated only by geography rather than by values and outlook. Rather than distinctiveness, it was – after all – fundamental harmony that characterised the relationship between them. (4)

In short, ‘Welsh Labour’ capsized with remarkable rapidity. The failure of those leaders who were its champions to embed their project in the party’s structures meant that its demise went largely unresisted. Indeed, it was accompanied by a chorus of remarkably virulent anonymous press briefings by members of the Welsh PLP strongly implying that it was high time that their Senedd Labour group colleagues learn to recognise their proper place, namely as the junior partner within the party in Wales. (5)

Old-fashioned Labourism had reasserted itself. Westminster-centric, top-down, centralising: by early 2025, the Welsh Labour Party bore little resemblance to the party that had won the 2021 devolved election so handily. While increasingly calamitous polling numbers would encourage Eluned Morgan to return to the differentiation strategy (‘the red Welsh way’) in order to try to stem the tide, this was never more than half-hearted. It also seems to have been almost entirely ineffective.

Given that for more than a quarter of a century, the ‘Welsh Labour’ project was widely regarded as being synonymous with the Labour Party in Wales – its essence rather than a ‘project’ within it – its precipitous collapse surely demands a retrospective reconsideration. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to provide such an accounting. Even so, the following seems clear. ‘Welsh Labour’ was always more of a mood or vibe than a distinctive policy platform: a rhetorical focus on differentiation combined with soft Welsh nationalist messaging.

There is, however, at least one policy area in which this characterisation is insufficient. In its thinking about the UK’s territorial constitution, and specifically on how to balance the competing demands of autonomy and unity in the context the post-devolution union state, Welsh Labour was genuinely creative. Its efforts ranged from rethinking the UK state’s conceptualisation of sovereignty to drafting ‘oven ready’ legislation that would underpin what it regarded as a stable devolution dispensation for Wales.

At various points, elements of this agenda appeared poised to secure wider party support. Thus, Labour’s 2017 UK general election manifesto committed the party to legislating the Welsh Government’s Alternative Wales Bill onto the UK statute book. Similarly, Sir Keir Starmer’s embrace of ‘radical federalism’ at the time of his campaign to become Labour leader in 2020 seemed to chime with the characteristic Welsh Labour embrace of shared as opposed to parliamentary sovereignty. But such moments were fleeting. The UK party’s commitment to far-reaching changes to the Welsh devolution settlement was abandoned by the time of the 2019 general election, while Starmer’s interest in ‘radical federalism’ appears to have evaporated as soon as his victory was secured.

Lingering hopes that an incoming Labour government would introduce meaningful changes to the devolution arrangements for Wales were dashed on publication of the final report of Labour’s Commission on the Future of the UK in 2022, which made abundantly clear that the Welsh PLP’s influence on the party’s internal deliberations trumped that of the Labour Government in Cardiff.

Beyond the constitutional realm, however, Welsh Labour engaged in very little by way of creative policy development. Rather, devolution evolved as a largely ‘defensive’ approach to social and economic policy. In the context of the Blair and Brown administrations that accompanied the first decade of devolved government, the Welsh Government sought to mitigate what many in the party regarded as the excesses of ‘New Labour’, for example the quasi-marketisation of public service delivery and the use of the Private Finance Initiative to fund new public infrastructure.

During the period between 2010 and 2016, the focus was on defending public services in Wales from the negative effects of the austerity programme pursued by the subsequent Conservative-Liberal Democrat and Conservative administrations. Following the 2016 referendum, much effort was expended on trying to defend Wales from the inevitable damage that would be caused by a so-called ‘hard Brexit’ given the nature of the Welsh economy and the country’s reliance on EU structural funding. Throughout, it was always easier to define the Welsh Government by what it was against rather what it was for.

It can be argued that such an outcome was always over-determined. The initial powers of the then National Assembly were extremely limited, a situation which persisted until 2011. Even after a positive vote in another referendum led to the unlocking of more extensive legislative powers, the Welsh devolution dispensation has remained significantly weaker than Scotland’s because justice functions are reserved to London acting in this case in an ‘England and Wales’ capacity.

Yet, while constitutional constraints may well have played a role in limiting the ambitions of successive Labour governments, the party’s internal culture also played a significant contributory role. A structural effect of one-party domination has been to stifle intellectual creativity within Wales’s dominant party. Moreover, recalling that one of the characteristics of ‘catch all’ parties is the wide range of different ideological positions found within them, to the extent that this label is applicable to Welsh Labour, then it is no surprise that maintaining the party’s dominant position for its own sake has been one of the few common denominator positions within it. Notwithstanding ritualistic references to Aneurin Bevan, Labour in Wales has long prided itself on its self-styled ‘pragmatism’.

Yet even if it was only in the area of the so-called territorial constitution that the ‘Welsh Labour’ project developed genuine programmatic substance, the project’s collapse over the course of 2024 was nonetheless damaging to the party’s electoral prospects. This is not because constitutional issues have high salience in themselves – although it would be a mistake to overlook the existence of a pervasive sense that Wales is not treated ‘fairly’ within the UK.

Rather, the characteristic ‘Welsh Labour’ stress on the distinctiveness of the Labour Party in Wales allowed the party to appear simultaneously both pro-union and proudly soft-nationalist in orientation. This strategic ambiguity on the ‘national question’ assisted Labour in maintaining an electoral coalition that straddled the complex terrain of national identities in Wales in a way that no other party was able to match.

In ceasing to compete for voters on the Welsh side of the country’s identity spectrum at the same as Reform UK was consolidating support among voters in Wales who prioritise their British identity, Labour undermined its own electoral base. Given the height from which Labour has now fallen, it is hard to think of many comparable acts of self-harm in recent political history.

You can follow Prof Wyn Jones on Bluesky here.

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

(1) Gwyn A. Williams, ‘The Concept of ‘Egemonia’ in Thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some notes on interpretation, Journal of the History of Ideas 21(4) (1960), p. 587.

(2) ‘The 2026 Senedd Election: What happened and why?’

(3) For anyone interested in this story see https://www.cymmrodorion.org/talk/nations-class-and-values-nationalisms-in-welsh-politics/

(4) It’s worth noting that Eluned Morgan never appears to have been particularly comfortable with Welsh Labour differentiation. In 2007 she was one of the first Labour politicians in Wales to call publicly for an end to Rhodri Morgan’s ‘clear red water’ strategy (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7011770.stm). She repeated the call in 2018 (https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2018-10-01/eluned-morgan-labour-leadership-red-water-corbyn)

(5) Dan Bloom, ‘Nigel Farage is surging in Britain’s rust belt – and Labour is panicked,’ Politico 25.2.2025 (https://www.politico.eu/article/nigel-farage-labour-rust-belt-britain-reform-uk-steelworks-retire/)

I am back from my European adventures (blimey some of the beer there is strong) and ready to dive back into the wonderful world of Welsh politics.

Today’s newsletter is in two halves. The first half breaks down why I believe it was a mistake for Senedd Members to walk out of the chamber after a controversial speech by a Reform MS.

Then we have a fascinating special report from Marcus on the current situation in Wales’ universities. He looks at where we are, how we got there and how we actually make things better.

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Your actions must reflect the reality that you have, not the reality that you want

Last week Reform MS Joe Martin delivered what I am sure he thought was the finest and most hilarious piece of oratory known to human kind.

If you want to picture it, imagine the guy at school who promised that they actually had a girlfriend but “they went to a different school”. Then imagine that guy tried to write a funny best man speech but had no concept of what a human being sounds like and asked ChatGPT to do it for him.

If you want to see Mr Martin board the banter bus you can do so in the video below. You can also see his fellow Reform MS Sarah Cooper-Lesadd (who has actually made some decent contributions in the Senedd) looking visibly uncomfortable.

This led to some Plaid, Labour and Green MSs leaving the chamber in protest.

One said:

“I’m going to leave this because I don’t accept any of this and I don’t want to be a part of it, so I’ll be leaving the Chamber.”

I can understand the sentiment behind this desire to leave. I totally get the instinct to disengage from debates like this. However, I believe this to be a huge mistake for several reasons. Let me explain why…

All MSs are elected by the people of Wales

There is a difference between a person on social media or a pub saying something you find reprehensible/unpleasant/unacceptable and an elected MS. You can’t respond (and nor should you) to every person making unpleasant comments on social media or in your local.

However, Joe Martin was elected because 29% of people in Wales who voted, put their X next to the Reform box. Reform were relentless in attacking Welsh spending overseas as well as the Nation of Sanctuary during the campaign, and this clearly resonated with some people. Reform MSs are the voice of their constituents. It’s counter productive to refuse to share a platform with people whose platform is our Parliament.

Those MSs who walked out were elected to be the voice of their constituents. If you voted Plaid the chances are you support the policies that Reform are decrying and it will be frustrating that your representatives chose not to be there to defend these policies and instead made Reform the largest party present in our parliament at that time.

As an MS, your actions must reflect the reality that you have, not the reality that you want.

Countering Reform is easy

When the Joe Martin’s of this world clear their throats to begin these speeches, Plaid, Labour, Green and Lib Dem politicians should be visibly salivating at the opportunity that is about to be provided to them.

That speech by Mr Martin was weak. These are not skilled orators delivering compelling speeches underpinned by a deep understanding.

If Welsh democracy is to thrive we need advocates who can dismantle flawed arguments, not refuse to engage with them. There are so many responses that could have been made to Mr Martin. The facts are, these schemes are a miniscule part of the budget, much of Wales’ international spending is used to develop the Welsh economy and the schemes can be used to effectively offset our carbon.

To be fair, there were some MSs like Dafydd Trystan, Gwyn Williams, Huw Thomas and Paul Rock who stayed to make these points (you can read the full transcript here).

There are legitimate questions to be answered about Wales’ overseas spending - you need to convince people

We have reported previously how sources within Reform have admitted that they mainly see Senedd as a good setting to create social media content and generate momentum.

If you walk out of debates you don’t like, you leave the door wide open for Reform to shape the narrative. We saw this with the 20mph policy. Rather than truly fight for the merits of the policy, many members of the then Welsh Government distanced themselves from it and allowed others to shape the debate.

Plaid MSs in particular are right now at the front line in a fight for the very existence of Welsh democracy. We don’t just need the Senedd to work, we need the people of Wales to SEE it work.

If you are living in a community where your highstreet is dying, your library has closed and no one is clearing up the broken glass in the local play area, you are allowed to ask why millions are being spent overseas.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a really powerful case to be made for why a small amount of overseas spending is a great investment for Wales. But politicians simply HAVE to make that case. If they think that the merits of their policy will be self-evident and don’t need to fight tooth and nail to justify it, they just need to Google “referendum 2016”.

If you are a politician and you can’t think of a good enough reason for this overseas spending then perhaps you shouldn’t be doing it.

If you can think of good reasons but can’t express it succinctly and articulately, perhaps you shouldn’t be doing your job.

There is a fight going on for the direction of travel for politics in Wales and the wider UK, for who we are and what we want to be. You don’t win a fight by refusing to accept you are in it.

Wales’ broken university funding system

Reporting by Marcus Hughes

Universities in Wales are in crisis.

Combined, Welsh universities are more than £97m in operating deficit after another year which saw widespread cost-saving measures with redundancies and course cuts. That’s up from the £77m deficit reported in 2023/24.

According to analysis from Medr, the body tasked with funding and regulating post-16 education in Wales, continual cost-cutting “is not sustainable” and university bosses must find fresh income to reverse the tide of decline. The same body recently said the financial health of three universities - Aberystwyth University, Bangor University and University of Wales Trinity St David - is “comparatively fragile”.

In a paper published just before the end of the last Senedd term, the Welsh Government itself warned that the current post-16 education model is becoming financially and demographically unstable. Without reform of the system, Wales risks worsening inequality and skill shortages.

Universities are vital to Wales’ future growth as major recipients of research and development funding that will create the well-paid jobs our economy desperately needs. You can’t have a prosperous Wales without a functioning higher-education system.

But seismic shifts toward the marketisation of university funding in England and Wales have brought us to a point where higher education has become a commercial competition rather than a national effort towards creating a skilled, productive workforce and a strong economy.

In short, Welsh universities have been integrated into a market system structurally tilted toward prestige, scale, and capital — one they simply weren’t built to compete within.

Rescuing the sector is another mammoth task among are very long list for the new Plaid Welsh Government.

Student finance reforms – sowing the seeds of failure

Students paying their own tuition fees is a relatively new concept.

Prior to 1990, higher education was essentially free to the individual student. Local Education Authorities (LEAs) paid tuition fees and provided maintenance grants. Students could work part time to earn extra cash if they wanted or, sometimes, they’d even be eligible for unemployment benefits during the summer months. It was a system that made university education incredibly accessible and was one of the factors that contributed to the creation of an upwardly socially mobile generation in the latter half of the 20th century.

Some loans were introduced in 1990 but they were only used to assist students in meeting living costs.

From 1998 to 2012, universities were funded primarily through direct government block grants but some low, capped tuition fees were introduced on top. These fees were about £1,000 when they came in in 1998 and rose to £3,290 by 2011, but students from lower income backgrounds often had these fees covered by grants or had them waived.

As university education was essentially subsidised with public money, strict caps on how many students each university could accept were in place. The thought went that if the government was funding higher education, there had to be a ceiling on the number of students receiving a benefit from that funding to avoid costs spiralling out of control. The fairest way to do it was to allocate each institution a certain number of students.

All of this changed in the 2010s, when England and Wales underwent a number of changes that ultimately sowed the seeds for the current crisis we’re experiencing in Wales. These changes were made during the Conservative/ Lib Dem UK Government coalition when George Osborne was in charge of the Treasury.

Starting in 2012, fundamental reforms shifted university funding from direct public teaching grants to a model where the student took on the bulk of the cost pressure with higher tuition fees.

You might remember that the tuition fee cap was set at £9,000 per year for domestic students (from a starting point of £3,375), with international students charged higher uncapped fees. This hasn’t been raised significantly since then and the current cap stands at £9,250. If they had risen with inflation the figure would be closer to £14k.

A new student loans system was introduced to cover these higher fees – with repayments contingent on graduates earning more than a specific income threshold.

Shortly after this, the then coalition government announced the removal of student number controls.

Osborne’s plan was essentially to open universities up to the market. Universities would charge students for the privilege of attending, accessing their facilities, and benefiting from the badge of honour that came with being an alumnus.

Scrapping student number controls was another method of exposing the sector to free market principles. The argument was that lifting the limit would give more students the opportunity to attend university and those students would vote with their feet. Institutions would be incentivised to be more attractive to students and that competition would improve standards and increase availability.

How has this worked out in Wales?

Introducing free market competition to the higher education sector has had profoundly uneven consequences for Welsh institutions.

We currently have eight universities in Wales (not counting the Open University). They are:

• Aberystwyth University

• Bangor University

• Cardiff University

• Cardiff Metropolitan University

• Swansea University

• University of South Wales

• University of Wales Trinity Saint David

• Wrexham University

About 150,000 students attend those universities annually, and they generate an estimated £5.3bn for the economy and more than 61,700 jobs. The societal benefit is indisputable. These are vital institutions.

However, only three - Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea- feature in all three of the global rankings and of those, only Cardiff can count itself as one of the prestigious Russell Group universities.

While we might feel discomfort with the idea of “prestige”, the truth is in a market of competition for students (and the best, higher achieving students who improve league table performance), paying attention to this does matter.

All universities are officially classified into high, medium, and lower tariff groupings. Higher tariffs are the most prestigious institutions requiring the highest grades to gain entry – Cardiff University is again the only one in Wales. Then we have medium tariff universities (Swansea, Aberystwyth, and Bangor) and our lower tariff institutions are Cardiff Metropolitan University, the University of South Wales, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and Wrexham University.

With rising inflation and cost pressure, universities across the UK are struggling to recruit enough students to make the finances work. Higher tariff universities share that pressure.

Chasing the income those students bring with them, higher tariff institutions in England are now accepting a larger proportion of applicants than lower and medium tariff universities.

There are signs that they’ve lowered their entry expectations to do so and expanded courses in arts, humanities, business and social sciences. WONKHE, the higher education sector news service, ran some excellent analysis on this.

Essentially, grades are often overpredicted at A Level. Teachers want to push students to do better, and there’s an acknowledgment on their part that a higher predicted grade will help students secure conditional offers at more prestigious universities, which has the welcome side effect of pushing up a school or college’s reputation in the process.

But even if it turns out a student hasn’t quite made the grades on results day, empty beds in halls don’t pay for themselves, so higher tariff universities are incentivised to accept them anyway.

This has led to higher tariff institutions hoovering up a greater and greater share of the students, leaving lower and middle tariff universities (remember, Wales has seven of these) struggling to make up the difference.

The UK-wide change is illustrated in this graph:

The data suggests Russell Group universities now accept nearly 50,000 more students than they did a decade ago.

That might be great news if you’re an A Level student applying to university and you really want to study in York, Warwick, or Durham, for example. You are now a highly prized financial asset for those universities and they’ll gladly take you, and you don’t need to worry so much that you got ABB rather than AAA. They will look past that.

But it’s decidedly bad news if you’re on the board of a middle or lower tariff Welsh university and those students who would previously direct their tuition fee loans your way are now preparing to settle in Liverpool or Manchester for three years.

The international student bubble

Universities are run as charities. So if you don’t have enough students to make the university solvent, you have to begin cutting costs fast. When about 50% of the cost of running a university is in staffing, and student numbers are dropping, redundancies are the obvious result. But that carries reputational damage and fear of a spiral of decline in quality.

Keen to avoid that scenario, what the boards of some of these universities decided to do was shore up their numbers with international students – from China, India, Pakistan and Nigeria. They can charge these students higher uncapped fees, balancing the books and keeping the wheels turning.

This approach bought some time but many in the sector saw it for what it was – a bubble that failed to address the underlying problem.

The issue with this strategy is it relied on the Boris Johnson government’s liberalisation of rules around student recruitment from overseas. Keen to deliver on the promise of a more globalised United Kingdom after Brexit, the Conservative government introduced a two-year post-study work visa for overseas students with no cap on numbers and lax rules around dependents coming here with them.

After this, we saw a huge influx of international arrivals who happily filled seats in lecture halls and topped up those university balance sheets. Sighs of relief.

These graphs show how the spread of where our students were coming from changed in ten years:

Note the contrasts. Cardiff University — Wales’ only higher tariff institution — maintained a relatively stable international student profile, while several medium and lower tariff universities became massively dependent on overseas recruitment.

More recently successive UK governments have been clamping down on visa rules. Under the Tories, only PhD students have been able to bring their partner and children to the UK while they were studying since 2024. From 2027, the UK Graduate (post-study work) visa is being reduced from two years to 18 months for Bachelor’s and Master’s degree students.

At the time Keir Starmer said the changes were part of a move to “take back control of our borders.”

This has led to a quick drop off in applications from those countries and those institutions losing their lifeline.

What are Welsh universities for?

Let’s step back a minute.

In case you have taken our explanation of the middle/lower tariff generalisation of seven of Wales’ universities as an acceptance of academic elitism, that is far from the case.

The fact our universities have a lower threshold of accessibility is a surviving vestige of their founder’s aim in establishing them in the first place. The first University of Wales wasn’t established until 1893 after a fierce campaign by ordinary men and women to win the right for a university education in their own country.

Many of our other higher education institutions began life as training colleges, amalgamating and growing to what became known as technical colleges and then universities in their own right.

The very point of all of this was to improve accessibility – so that you or I could gain access to quality education in our own communities.

The devolution of higher education in 1999 opened up new possibilities. Welsh higher education could further grow into something distinct from England’s offering, benefit our own population in unique ways and build strength from difference.

But the fact is, successive Welsh Governments have failed to capitalise on that opportunity and our tether to the English fees system has pitted us in a competition we are destined to lose.

Lessons from Scotland

The fact is, Scotland historically has taken braver steps to diverge its approach to higher education provision from the English system, whereas Wales has been more reactive.

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Hi everyone,

Will might be off on his European travels, but we are back nonetheless with another midweek briefing for you.

This week we saw members of the Senedd trade blows over a question concerning the Nation of Sanctuary, and further examples of Reform’s increasingly confusing approach to childcare.

The Senedd gets heated over the Nation of Sanctuary

There was a powerful exchange in Plenary this Tuesday when the topic of immigration came up.

Questioning Rhun ap Iorwerth on the "potential risks to public safety" arising from the Nation of Sanctuary, Reform’s Joe Martin brought up the recent attack on Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast. A man has been arrested and charged with attempted murder following that incident.

Mr Martin asked:

“There have been zero instances of Ukrainian refugees trying to behead people in the streets… the same cannot be said for Sudanese asylum seekers.

“What will the First Minister do to make sure that when the next inevitable attack happens, it doesn’t take place in Wales?”

Over audible gasps in the siambr, Mr ap Iorwerth replied saying he “will not rise to that from the Reform benches” and added “we’re going to have to get used to this kind of contribution where there is an attempt to drive wedges between communities.”

Labour MS Shav Taj later gave a powerful speech as she told the chamber she was a “proud child of immigrants” whose late father had chosen Wales over England.

Saying the Nation of Sanctuary was about “keeping other communities safe” and giving refuge to those fleeing war, Ms Taj rebuked Reform, saying:

“Some of the vile stuff we’ve just been hearing is actually really shocking. It’s disturbing for the children who visit the Senedd, who will be... watching our debate here.

“...suggesting this link between sanctuary and risk to public safety is not supported by evidence and actually risks unnecessarily stoking up fear amongst our communities.”

It’s worth noting that if Reform are genuinely concerned about asylum seekers posing a threat to people in the UK, they they really should back the Nation of Sanctuary scheme. Key pillars of it include promoting Welsh culture and heritage as well as ensuring that refugees with severe mental health issues are supported.

Reform vote against themselves

Reform have been on quite a journey when it comes to childcare.

During the election campaign, their manifesto didn’t even mention it. Then last week 11 of their 34 MSs – a third of their members – bizarrely voted in favour of an amendment that criticised its absence from their proposals for Wales.

We asked Reform why this had happened but didn’t receive a response. It seems they didn’t understand the motion and accidentally voted the wrong way.

Their MS Iain McIntosh later posted on X criticising the Welsh Tories for voting the same way he had, alongside a rather odd AI image of the First Minister in bed with Tory leader Darren Millar. He later said he had been referring to the previous amendment, which the Tories supported but Reform didn’t, but the wording of the two were nearly identical.

Sources tell us that that Reform’s chief whip Llyr Powell has contacted Reform MSs to “take ownership” of mistake. He told also them he would personally take responsibility for the error in the media. There is significant anger among some Reform MSs that he doesn’t seem to have done this.

What is actually happening with mobile phones in schools?

Education minister Anna Brychan confirmed on Tuesday that headteachers in Wales will be “strongly encouraged” to restrict pupils using phones during the school day.

While she didn’t explicitly say the Welsh Government would mandate a full ban, Ms Brychan implied that she would support schools introducing their own guidance. She said:

“As cabinet minister I fully support, and strongly encourage, headteachers to introduce clear and robust restrictions on mobile phone use during the school day, up to and including a full restriction across the school site.”

She said a consultation involving teachers and parents would start in September with a view to developing statutory guidance on phones.

The UK Government previously said it aims to make England’s schools “mobile phone-free environments by default”, and earlier this week announced plans to ban social media platforms offering services to under-16s.

The Welsh Government’s next challenge

We are now only a month away from recess in the Senedd on July 20. Before that Plaid will need to pass their supplementary budget.

A supplementary budget is tabled when the Welsh Government’s financial situation changes during the year. Given the change in government since the most recent budget came in back in April, it’s no surprise that Plaid are rejigging things.

Plaid’s lack of Senedd majority means they are going to need the support of other parties for their supplementary budget, which they are putting forward on June 23.

In reality, this is most probably going to come from Labour or the Tories. Reform are unlikely to do so. Unless there is a serious change in the Welsh Government’s plans, it seems likely they will get the support they need – from a Labour or Tory point of view, there would be little benefit in rejecting it so early in the life of the new government.

The chamber erupts in laughter

On Tuesday evening in plenary Reform’s Louise Emery, responding to Culture Minister Heledd Fychan’s statement on culture spending, asked how the Welsh Government “can ensure there's no foreign interference” when it comes to funding news outlets.

Reform UK received £9m from donors in the first quarter of the year, the largest amount given to any political party in that period, with the largest single contribution coming from Thailand-based crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne who gave a £3m donation between January and March. Crypto magnate Ben Delo (who is based in Hong Kong) also donated £4m to Reform in two £2m lump sums in January and March.

There was widespread laughter in the Senedd after Ms Emery expressed her concern about foreign interference.

Plaid’s plan to tackle poverty

If Plaid are going to have any chance of persuading people they are different from the previous Welsh Governments, they will need to get serious on poverty.

Last week Deputy First Minister Sioned Williams announced three steps the Welsh Government are taking on this. They are:

• Establishing an ‘Expansion of Childcare Expert Steering Group’ to oversee Plaid’s childcare offer

• Setting up an expert group on the new Cynnal £10 child payment, co-chaired by Ms Williams and Steffan Evans, chief executive of the Bevan Foundation

• Developing a new plan to tackle child poverty including “clear targets, benchmarks and milestones”

A lot of Plaid’s early work has amounted to setting up steering groups and committing to publish plans and targets. As we wrote during our interview with Rhun ap Iorwerth last weekend, this is entirely reasonable at this point in government. The big question will be whether and when people affected by these issues will feel a difference as a result of what they are doing.

We will be bringing you a special newsletter in August examining how Plaid performed in their first 100 days.

Would another UK Labour leader be any more popular than Starmer?

With more ministerial resignations in the past week, things are looking dicey for Keir Starmer again.

There is growing speculation in Westminster that a leadership contest could happen, particularly if Andy Burnham wins the Makerfield by-election on Thursday.

The latest YouGov polling this week shows Starmer is particularly unpopular in Wales.

Among those surveyed in Wales, 18% had a favourable view of him, compared to 72% unfavourable – a net favourability figure of -54. This is 10 percentage points worse than even in England.

Two of the leading contenders to replace him, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting, didn’t fare much better, with -41 and -49 net unfavourability respectively. For Streeting, there were a large number of ‘don’t knows’, which indicates he probably isn’t very well-known in Wales.

The only one who seems slightly more popular is Burnham, with 27% favourable and 42% unfavourable, a net rating of −15.

The sample size for the poll was very small, so we can’t read too much into it. But what we can say is that a change of Prime Minister probably isn’t going to magically transform UK Labour’s popularity in Wales.

Some elections to keep an eye on

Is it just us, or does the Senedd election feel like a long time ago now?

19 of the new MSs were previously sitting councillors. That means there are a whole load of by-elections are taking place to replace them, with the first happening later this week.

On Thursday June 18 there will be no less than seven by-elections:

• Two in Conwy to replace Louise Emery and Tom Montgomery, who were elected to the Senedd for Reform

• Two in Swansea – one to replace Reform’s Francesca O’Brien and another to fill the seat left by Robert Francis-Davies, who passed away in May

• Three in Wrexham to replace Marc Jones and Carrie Harper from Plaid, and Nigel Williams from Reform

We will be keeping an eye on these results, and there will be even more to look forward to this summer. They are:

• June 25th – Carmarthenshire, Denbighshire (2), Rhondda Cynon Taf and Merthyr Tydfil

• July 2nd – Powys (3) and Torfaen

• July 9th – Cardiff, Flintshire (2), Gwynedd, Neath Port Talbot, Pembrokeshire and the Vale of Glamorgan

Reform are recruiting their Senedd team

This week Reform UK posted adverts for a number of Senedd jobs – and the descriptions reveal a fair bit about where the party currently stands.

Unlike the other party groups, Reform are building their back office team from a standing start after a breakthrough election.

They are recruiting:

• A senior group secretary

• A group secretary

• Three junior press officers

• A junior researcher

Every one of the six jobs are offered as six-month fixed term contracts “with the potential for extension upon satisfactory performance”.

More post-election tidbits

A few weeks back we brought you some of the excellent work done by Wales Governance Centre breaking down the Senedd election result.

There was plenty we couldn’t fit in that newsletter but which is definitely worth looking at.

Firstly, the WGC identified that Wales and Scotland are actually quite different when it comes to constitutional issues like independence and devolution.

Look at this graph:

The far left of the graph shows people who want to abolish the devolved parliaments and the right shows support for independence.

In Wales, only 16% of respondents strongly support independence compared with 29% in Scotland. Strong support for scrapping the Senedd was also higher (22%) compared to those in Scotland who strongly want to do away with Holyrood (15%).

What is also interesting is just how unpopular a leader Eluned Morgan was.

During the last Welsh Government, her approval rating was 3.7 out of ten on average, only marginally higher than Vaughan Gething’s which was 3.3.

For context, the WGC say it is apparently hard to score highly on this metric. Most leaders do well to get a five.

One possible way to interpret this is that Eluned Morgan inherited some of the ill feeling towards her predecessor Vaughan Gething (who was, unsurprisingly, unpopular, given how dominated his short tenure was by scandal).

In fact, support for Welsh leaders has taken a nosedive in recent years. Look how Gething and Morgan score compared to previous First Ministers Rhodri Morgan, Carwyn Jones and Mark Drakeford.

Job cuts at BBC Wales

When we sat down with the First Minister last week, one of the things we asked him about was the job cuts planned at BBC Wales.

In April the BBC announced it would be cutting around 10% of its 21,500 staff, including at BBC Wales’ headquarters in Cardiff. It means around 2,000 jobs could be lost, with the corporation targeting a 15% cut in its news operation.

It is never nice to hear about job cuts in what is already a tough industry in Wales. We were keen to ask Rhun ap Iorwerth about this, given that he previously worked as a BBC journalist before he went into politics.

During our interview last week the First Minister told us:

“This isn’t devolved, and I can’t influence the BBC, but as a journalist I want to make sure that across the plurality of platforms, we invest in people and in journalism, in skills and so on.”

How could devolution change?

The Institute of Welsh Affairs, a think tank and charity, has written a report on Plaid’s plans to change devolution in Wales.

The piece is pretty lengthy – you can read the full article here – but makes some interesting points about what Plaid might do in government beyond policy.

IWA co-director Joe Rossiter argues that rather than a simple lack of good policies, some of Wales’ issues under past Welsh governments are down to a “delivery gap” between legislation and actual outcomes.

Among Plaid’s plans are to create a digitally enabled Welsh ‘Cabinet Office’, which Mr Rossiter writes has potential but needs more detail. (The UK Cabinet Office alone has more than 15,000 staff members, around triple the number in the entire Welsh civil service.)

The newly-created Cabinet Minister for Government Effectiveness & the Constitution, which Plaid have created to oversee delivery of their priorities, will also need real teeth if it is going to work, he argues.

Clearly Plaid feels that making meaningful changes in Wales is going to require more than just tinkering with legislation. But there are very real questions to answer about how some of these would work, particularly given the First Minister told us just last week he doesn’t expect any increases to the number of civil servants.

A pioneering Welsh scheme doing good work

A Welsh scheme aimed at improving the lives of ex-prisoners and reducing reoffending is seeing positive results so far, a study has found.

The Inside Out Support Wales (IOSW) Brighter Pathways programme at HMP Swansea provides mentoring for people leaving prison, who often face complex barriers to reintegration, including a lack of support and difficulties with housing, mental health and employment.

A study by the University of the West of England (UWE) has found the scheme is leading to better stability and engagement with services for those who leave prison, and more confidence to reshape their lives.

Only last week a report by the Welsh affairs committee in the Commons found “serious” concerns in the Welsh prison estate due to overcrowding and staffing issues. Reoffending, which in England and Wales is at 28.9%, is estimated to cost £18.1 billion per year and the average annual cost of a prison place now exceeds £51,724.

A Welsh landmark has been voted the best on earth

A church in a Welsh village has been voted the “best place on earth” in an online poll.

St Mary’s Church in Beddgelert has been voted the “best place on earth” in a Reddit poll, which asked users on the “Terrible Maps” subreddit, which has more than 30,000 visitors per week, to vote out half of a map until one location remained.

Best known for its incredible views, proximity to Snowdon and the grave of Gelert the dog, who was slain by Llywelyn, Prince of North Wales in the 13th century, Beddgelert’s church was the last one standing after 29 rounds.

That’s all for today. This weekend we’ll be bringing you a special report on universities in Wales.

Take care,

Ryan and Marcus

© 2026 Throstle Worde Media ltd.

Throstle Worde Media ltd. Severn House, Hazell Drive, Newport, South Wales, Newport, NP10 8FY. Company No. 15984234

Hi and welcome back!

In the second half of our interview with the First Minister I wanted to dig into a few areas where I think there are already real questions around Plaid’s plans.

The environment. When/if the first ructions and disagreements within the Plaid group happen, I strongly suspect they will be around the environment. I think you can already argue that they are falling short of their previous rhetoric regarding the nature emergency.

The economy. Before the election Rhun ap Iorwerth probably spent as much time trying to prove Plaid’s economic credentials and ingratiate himself with the business community than he did anything else. But when you really dug into their plans the answer usually amounted to ‘the new Welsh Development Agency will sort that.’ That begs a whole heap of new questions…

Childcare. When will their flagship policy to introduce 20 hours of universal childcare for children aged from nine months to four years actually happen?

Let’s explore what he had to say one these issues….

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