25 Years of Devolution in Wales

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 28th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Rob Roberts (Delyn) (Ind)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of 25 years of devolution in Wales.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Sir Christopher.

Before I address the motion, may I speak on behalf of the House for the first time, and likely for the last time, in sending our condolences to the Welsh First Minister, Mark Drakeford, on the recent sudden passing of his wife, Clare? I never met Mrs Drakeford, but by all accounts she was a kind-hearted and compassionate lady, and I cannot begin to imagine how the First Minister and his family are feeling. I know that our thoughts are with them at this sad time.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for finding time for the debate. I submitted the application last July in the hope of holding the debate in September. The eagle-eyed among us will note that although the debate is entitled “25 Years of Devolution in Wales”, the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales—the Senedd—will be next May. However, 18 September 2022 was 25 years since the day of the referendum that brought about devolution and led us to this point. Sadly, the debate could not held then because of the sad passing of Her late Majesty. I am grateful to the Committee for finding time for the debate today.

As you well know, Sir Christopher, Wales is a small but proud country, with a unique identity and an unusual degree of political continuity. It ought to have been able to develop and introduce unique policies, implemented in ways that just were not possible prior to devolution. But the record goes to show that in so many measurable ways, devolution has simply not delivered in terms of its impact on the lives of our constituents. It is not good enough to keep blaming Whitehall 25 years on.

In the almost 25 years of devolution, Wales has fallen behind the rest of the Union in nearly all of its devolved policy areas, and has continuously fallen short on UK-wide priorities. Devolution has not resulted in a new form of politics, as proponents had hoped. Far from reinvigorating democracy, voters are underwhelmed by devolution.

What of the increased democratic representation that we were promised? The Assembly was established on a 50.2% turnout of the people of Wales, with an outcome of 50.3% in favour and 49.7% against. From a situation in which 25.3% of the people of Wales voted in favour of establishing devolution, Wales was thrust into a project of seismic proportions, which would change the constitutional make-up of the UK irrevocably. It is ironic that we had uproar and claims of illegitimacy about the recent 52% to 48% vote on the B-word, yet the 50.3% to 49.7% result, which has led to nothing positive in Wales, went ahead unquestioned and, crucially, with no subsequent assessment of whether it is actually working.

Since 1998, turnout in elections to the Welsh Assembly—subsequently renamed the Senedd at great but pointless expense—has declined continuously, reaching as low as 38.2% and never exceeding 46%. That woeful figure only goes to prove that voters have become apathetic and disengaged with the Welsh Government. Can we blame them?

My constituent Mikey Connolly pointed out to me recently that 23 out of the 40 Senedd constituency seats and three out of the five regional areas are covered by people who live in the Cardiff and Swansea regions. No matter what happens, or how bad things may get for people living in the remaining 75% of the country, even if every single one of those individuals voted for the same alternative party in every single election, Labour would never be voted out of power, so long as the majority of voters in Cardiff and Swansea are kept happy.

As Mr Connolly rightly asks,

“what incentive is there then for Labour in Wales to improve the quality of life of those in Mid and North Wales, or even create policies that adequately account for the vast differences in culture, population, needs and quality of life between the South and the rest of Wales”?

He is 100% correct: it is a flawed system that will leave the people of north Wales in particular with a permanent democratic deficit and feeling, as we already do, not like the poor relations, but like the forgotten relations.

The cost of the Senedd in 2021-22 was £62.9 million. There are proposals to increase the number of Members from 60 to 96, which would take an already inflated cost up by another £12.5 million, giving less value for money for the people of Wales time and again.

Recently, we saw a report saying that the buildings of the Betsi Cadwaladr health board in north Wales are only 62% operationally safe, with some £350 million needed just to bring existing structures up to scratch, without talking about any new ones. Now, the health board has been placed in special measures, which are special in name only, because this has been the case for the past eight years, with no noticeable improvement in service for the long-suffering people of north Wales. Had we not been paying the money for a devolved Administration for the past 25 years, we could have ensured that every one of our hospitals across Wales was properly maintained, not falling down around the ears of our dedicated and hard-working NHS staff.

Routinely in this Parliament, Labour MPs attack the Government on a range of perceived issues—rightly so; as Opposition Members, it is their duty to do that—but in Wales Labour has been front and centre since 1999, and failing to deliver since 1999. Since the advent of devolution, Welsh Labour has been virtually unopposed in government. Never having won an outright majority, Labour relies heavily on the support of Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats, which are both seemingly as reluctant as Labour to accept the part they have played in mismanagement on a colossal scale.

Interestingly, on a visit to Llandudno last year, the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), said that

“a Welsh Labour government is the living proof of what Labour in power looks like. How things can be done differently and better… A blueprint for what Labour could do across the UK.”

What exactly does Welsh Labour have to show for almost a quarter of a century in power as a blueprint for the rest of the UK?

I want to examine some of the areas of life in Wales that have been devolved, and how they have developed and progressed over the period of devolution. First, let me consider the issue that is probably closest to most people’s hearts and most important in their lives—the health service. As we know, the Labour party in this Parliament relies heavily on scaremongering and unfounded soundbites such as, “Only Labour can save the NHS,” and, “The Tories will sell off the NHS,” while simultaneously going out of its way to ignore the scale of the crises in Wales, and pointing out everything that is wrong in England but never doing anything to fix the even worse issues in Wales.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this debate to the House, but I am aware that each region should have the opportunity to express its own ideas. I am sure he is not saying any different, but does he agree that the beauty of this United Kingdom is the ability to express our British strength through the lens of our individual nations, and that devolution and the ability for local issues to be determined locally by locally elected representatives are always goals that should be striven for? Will he join me in urging the Government to strive towards those goals, rather than the goal of appeasing the European Union, which we voted to leave, but which is determining the devolution process itself?

[Rob Roberts]

As always, the hon. Gentleman makes some excellent points. I agree with the sentiment of what he is trying to get to and trying to achieve, and that it is important for local areas and the regions to have their say on a hyper-local basis, but I am much more focused on outcomes. From my point of view, when we are having these debates and making decisions closer to home, the most important thing is whether people in those areas are benefiting from that process. I hope to go on to prove that they are not.

Especially in this place, we tend to get a little caught up on process and form, and on how we do things. We do not necessarily focus on what we have done, what the outcome is, and how that benefits the people we are here to serve. The hon. Gentleman’s points are well made. I hope I can show that devolution is not necessarily working in the way that it should. Hopefully we can improve it—let us see—but it is certainly not going exactly as it was planned.

Health boards are in special measures. As I mentioned, Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which serves my Delyn constituency in north Wales, has been in special measures for eight years, except for a conveniently short period just before the most recent Senedd election. It was brought out of special measures in the run-up to the campaign period, despite there having been no actual changes, and then, interestingly, put back into a regime of targeted interventions shortly after the election. I am sure that was just a coincidence; I would not want to read anything sinister into that.

Labour’s rhetoric on the NHS hits closer to home than it would ever care to admit. Despite no modern-day Conservative Government ever having cut the NHS, Welsh Labour cut it in 2015. The King’s Fund expertly demonstrated that recently. It reported that under the Conservatives the NHS has had a budget increase of 39% in real terms since 2010, with planned spending for the Department of Health and Social Care in England at £180.2 billion. Welsh Labour has failed the NHS. A blueprint for what Labour can do across the UK? I hope not.

Secondly, Wales has the lowest achievement and poorest educational outcomes in the entire UK. Across the period, school spending per pupil has been consistently highest in Scotland and generally lower in Northern Ireland. In 2021-22, spending per pupil totalled £7,600 per head in Scotland, £6,400 in Northern Ireland, about £6,700 in England and £6,600 in Wales. Given the nature of the funding formulas, the funding in Wales should be a lot closer to that of Scotland because, for every £1 spent on services in England, there is around £1.20 for that service going to Wales—a significant uplift, yet Welsh schools are consistently underfunded. Again, Labour is turning its back on students and barely holding up an already struggling education system.

In 2019, it was discovered that out of the £2.5 billion earmarked for schools in Wales’s education budget, at least £450 million never even made it. Where has the money gone? It has been swallowed up by a wasteful bureaucracy and the inefficient spending that lies at the heart of devolution. That proves that Labour’s devolution plans were not fully thought through. A blueprint for what Labour can do across the UK? I certainly hope not.

Thirdly, in a 2019 Cabinet meeting the Welsh Government declared a climate emergency. It was not a priority—they just slipped it in under any other business at the end of the meeting. No real policy action was ever taken. In fact, their preservation of the natural environment is also flawed. In October 2018, Labour AMs voted against stopping the dumping of nuclear mud in Cardiff bay. They failed to invest in proper flood defences. They presided over a 28% increase in cattle slaughtering at the end of August 2019 due to a rise in bovine tuberculosis, causing huge damage to our agricultural sector.

Finally on the environment, a 2018 Senedd research briefing found that pollution was causing 2,000 deaths a year in Wales. Imagine pollution causing deaths in Wales, a land of nothing but fields, trees and wide open spaces. It beggars belief. Despite the UK as a whole being the fastest decarbonising nation in the G7, and despite Welsh Labour’s trumpeting—quite rightly—the amount of recycling done in Wales, Labour has cut carbon emissions in Wales by only half the rate of the UK. On climate and the environment, devolution has categorically failed. How can Welsh Labour be so far behind UK targets and still blame Westminster for its failings?

I will move on to housing, which is immensely important to my constituents and communities across Wales. As recently as the 2019 general election, the leader of the Labour party, who leads the official Opposition to the Government in Westminster, pledged 100,000 new council houses every year. It sounds like a wonderful figure, but we have to remember that the Welsh Government, under Labour management, released data detailing a meagre 57 builds by local authorities in 2019. I am lucky enough to say that 39 of them were in my constituency—but still.

Data from the National House Building Council confirms that, in 2020, there were 125 new homes built in my constituency. In 2021 there were 109, and in 2022 there were a massive 42 new houses. Bearing in mind that those are all new-build private properties rather than social housing, where are all the houses that the Leader of the Opposition pledged would be built under Labour? The Welsh Government have every opportunity to build them in Wales, but they do not materialise. Concurrently, there has been a 45% increase in rough sleeping in Wales under Labour. A blueprint for what Labour can do across the UK? I hope not.

When we delve deeper into the management of the Welsh economy, we see the failure of devolution for voters in Wales. Some £157 million has been wasted on reports and reviews on the much-needed M4 relief road in Newport—a policy that was shelved by the Welsh Government in 2019, despite the astonishing amount of money spent on it. If south Wales had that relief road, it would ease congestion and unlock a new era of opportunities in the area, allowing more people to travel in and out of Wales to work and set up businesses.

Other Members will know much more about that than I do, given that I am from north Wales, but there is a similar situation in the north, with millions of pounds having been wasted on new road plans—red routes, blue routes, purple polka-dotted routes and all sorts of things, such as compulsory purchasing of properties and unfinished road-building projects. I used to refer to one of the Welsh Government’s previous Ministers for the Economy and Transport as the “Minister for Documentation”, as his Department seemed to produce report after report, study after study and consultation after consultation, but never actually did anything to improve things in north-east Wales.

On the subject of business and transport, the Welsh Labour Government and Plaid Cymru want to deliver a hammer blow to our vital tourism and hospitality sector with a tourism tax for Wales. Just when the industry is building back from the pandemic, it needs our support, not to be punished. Thousands of jobs are at risk if we do not stop the tax on tourism. Opposition from the Wales Tourism Alliance and others, including over 400 responses from the tourism industry, has been completely ignored by the Welsh Government, which is frustrating the industry, as it continues to be sidelined and ignored. It is just not good enough. My constituency of Delyn in north Wales relies heavily on our tourism industry, and the Welsh Labour Government’s tourism tax proposals will be a tax on Welsh hotels, Welsh hospitality and Welsh jobs at a time when we need to be taking measures to tackle our cost of living crisis, not to contribute to it.

The Welsh Government are rolling out a 20 mph speed limit across Wales, which will—pardon the pun—slow the economy even further. It denies local bodies the ability to make policy decisions affecting their community on a more local basis, not to mention that the roll-out will cost over £32 million and increase emissions. It is just a bizarre policy.

The correlation between increased legislative powers and decreased political engagement is a sign of resentment and apathy, and it is incredibly disappointing compared with the rest of the UK. The Welsh Government seem hellbent on the ideals of high tax and state expansion, when they have been failing in Wales for a quarter of a century.

Every week we sit on the green Benches for Prime Minister’s questions as Opposition Members shout, “You have been in charge 13 years; why haven’t you changed anything?” The Welsh Government have been in place for nearly 25 years, with nothing but downward spirals and declining services, but that is okay, they never shout about that. They are not here today, interestingly, to shout that the Senedd is not doing its job, but they are more than happy to yell across the Chamber at the UK Government.

The Welsh Government’s insistence on raising council tax by pulling those on lower incomes into higher council tax bands, and their decision to pursue a tourism tax, despite one in seven Welsh jobs relying on that sector, show why Wales is consistently failing on UK-wide priorities.

In education, the OECD and the PISA—programme for international student assessment—scores ranked Wales the lowest of all devolved members of the Union in every educational standards category between 2006 and 2018. Running with the same theme, our economic data make for challenging reading. Wales is unique with around 20% of the workforce relying on public-sector employment. That alone is not necessarily a bad thing, but considering that the private sector is equally reliant on Government, it is a harsher picture.

Subsidies and grants mask Wales’s real economic value, and suppress competition, innovation and entrepreneurship. Our micromanaged economy is stifling any chance of increased investment in Wales, which is crucial to any self-reliant economy. The Welsh Government’s inaction in tackling business rates continues to devastate the Welsh high street, where shop after shop has been boarded up and abandoned. To add insult to injury, in 2021 the UK Government provided Wales with the largest annual funding settlement since devolution began, but the mismatch between revenue and properly directed public spending remains a heavily unbalanced picture.

Indeed, only yesterday we found out that the Welsh Government, at a time when there are problems all over Wales with creaking public services, in the middle of covid had to give £155 million back to the Treasury, because they did not spend it in the correct financial year. They sat on £155 million in the middle of the pandemic, when that could—and should—have been used for improving our hospitals and our response to covid, along with other crucial infrastructure. That money was squandered by the Welsh Government. Devolution is failing the Welsh economy. A

“blueprint for what Labour could do across the UK,”

the Leader of the Opposition said. I do hope not.

Another sad but prime example of the Welsh Government’s recklessness with money is the purchase of Cardiff airport for £52 million in 2013. In March 2021, it was announced that the airport was being given another £42 million of taxpayers’ cash, while the £42.6 million that it already owed in debt to the Welsh Government was being written off altogether. That was a total spend of almost £100 million in nearly a decade for an airport that is said to be now worth £15 million, less than a third of what the Welsh Government paid for it 10 years ago.

We continue to be told that it will be used to connect Wales with the rest of the world. I have not found a single record of any current Welsh Government Minister having used it for foreign visits. It has cost the Welsh economy millions by failing to keep scheduled flights to Qatar in the middle east. An estimated £200 million of good taxpayer money has been completely and utterly wasted. It would have repaired almost the entire health board estate in north Wales.

As I have touched on the subject of the coronavirus pandemic, it is worth mentioning the abject failure of the Welsh Government, their handling of the pandemic and their outright refusal—inexplicably—to have a covid inquiry on the matter, safe in the knowledge that any UK-wide inquiry will secure media scrutiny only of the actions of the UK Government, and the decisions taken by Labour in Wales mean they will escape scot-free, so they need to answer almost nothing, despite repeatedly saying that every decision was specific and unique to Wales.

The exercise of a range of emergency powers that curtailed the liberty and closed the economy of Wales and its people was bad enough, but for the Welsh Government then to avoid accountability at all costs through an inquiry that focuses on how decisions were made has never been and will never be a tenable position. Under Labour, the fact is that Wales experienced the highest covid death rate per capita of all UK nations, despite a population density significantly lower than other parts, and economically cruel and unnecessary restrictions were imposed. Those measures must be properly scrutinised in an independent inquiry.

The First Minister went on social media at every possible opportunity, every time the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) was on the TV, and every time he said, “These measures are England only. The Prime Minister does not speak for Wales.” He kept on saying that. If he and the Welsh Government are so confident about their actions and the steps they took, why are they against their being examined in a Wales-specific inquiry? The very nature of devolution means that those in power are held accountable locally for the decisions made: ducking that is shameful and cowardly. That is what people will be saying, when the UK and Scottish leaders have ordered investigations into their own handling of the pandemic.

As discussions are being had by a noisy minority in support of more devolution and even the ludicrous notion of independence for Wales, we must all be bold enough to look at these failures and ensure that above all else, Wales is not handed more powers by this UK Parliament without proper scrutiny from this House. That is not to talk down Wales, as I will now doubtless be accused of doing; it is the harsh reality of the situation.

Wales is subsidised by England—it is. There is no point denying it or getting away from it. The total tax revenue in Wales is exceeded by far by the amount of spending there. The difference comes, quite rightly, from the UK Government, because we are firmly and comfortably part of a United Kingdom, but where do these shouters for independence think they will get the money to pay for everything? None of the public services in Wales work. Where will the funds come from for Wales to have its own courts, police, emergency services, welfare systems, state pension, defence, infrastructure and everything that an independent state would need? It is absolutely pie in the sky.

Whatever participants in this debate think, and wherever they sit on the political spectrum, as I mentioned to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), outcomes should be their priority. What makes the lives of the people in Wales better? The people of Delyn do not give two hoots about idealism or political shenanigans or things that go on in this place or in Cardiff; they do give two hoots about being able to put food on their table. They give two hoots about having jobs and opportunities, being able to provide their children with a better start in life and being able to rely on a health service to help them in their most difficult times.

Finally—hon. Members will be happy to hear—a short mention for the proposed expansion of the Senedd from 60 to 96 Members. I do not even know where to start. It is quite astonishing that an institution that already has 60 people for a country of 3.1 million—one for every 52,000 constituents—would need another 36 elected representatives. What is it going to do with them? England has 56 million people and 533 MPs. That is one for every 105,000 people: double what we have in Wales. London has almost 10 million people and the London Assembly scrapes by with just 25 members.

The ridiculous situation does not end there. Not only do those in favour want to add another 36 Members to the Senedd, but they want to further strip them of accountability. We currently have a bunch of constituency Senedd Members who are elected on a first-past-the-post basis, as happens here. We also have regional Senedd Members: some across north Wales, south Wales, central south Wales, west Wales and so on. They will do away with the constituency ones altogether—or kind of—and introduce a proportional representation system for the whole thing. We will not vote for an individual any more but for a party, and then the party will fill the seats it wins with whoever is top of its list. Each constituency will have multiple Members, and no people will be elected, only parties, with the seats filled from their internal lists. Call me a cynic, and something of a traditionalist—as I know you are, Sir Christopher—but I think that is an affront to democracy, as people will not be able to vote for the person they want and just have a bunch of people forced on to them by political parties without the first clue as to who they might be.

I have probably spoken for long enough. There is a great discussion going on in the Cabinet Office and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities about regional devolution deals across England. I caution hon. Members who call for increased localism in decisions that having those decisions made closer to the source does not automatically translate into better outcomes. If there is one thing we can learn from the failed devolution experiment in Wales, that is surely it. I have said it before and I say it again: it is my abiding hope that the Minister in his winding-up speech will confirm that there are plans to let the people of Wales have their say: not on whether there should be enhanced powers or more devolution, but on whether devolution should be allowed to carry on at all, so we can redirect the money wasted on a failed institution into providing better services for the people of Wales.

With all due respect, it shows how much value is placed on debating the institution and the issue that, sadly, virtually none of my Welsh MP colleagues are in the room to discuss the nature of the Senedd today—which is fundamental and one of the most important things to have ever happened in the lives of our constituents in Wales. That just goes to show the contempt that both the people in Wales and, potentially, the people in this House hold for the Senedd as an institution.