Can a Plaid Cymru Government learn from Labour’s failures?

Paul Griffiths

Congratulations to Rhun ap Iorwerdd and Plaid Cymru for the seats they have won at the Senedd, becoming the largest party and forming the Welsh Government.

I write as someone who has worked for and with Labour Welsh Governments over the past quarter of a century. I reflect on the relative successes and failings of those Labour Governments.

I offer to our new Government some of those reflections, doing so with all the humility of a contemporary election loser.

A primary objective of any government is to foster economic activity, meeting needs equitably, incentivising work and enterprise.

Bill Clinton’s advisers reminded us that Governments are judged fundamentally on their ability to deliver jobs and wages – “it’s the economy, stupid”. It was Karl Marx who argued that all our social and political relations are driven by our economic interests.

Labour Welsh Governments too often gave too little priority to nurturing economic activity. In pursuing social justice, we mitigated economic failure with bread and circuses for all.

Labour has not achieved the economic goal of well paid, sustainable jobs distributed broadly throughout the nation.

Productivity has stagnated since 2010. People feel that they work hard for too little reward and that their prospects, and those of their children, have diminished. The political parties held responsible for economic stagnation and inequality were punished severely in the 2026 Welsh Senedd elections.

Since 2022 I have been Monmouthshire County Council’s cabinet member for the county’s economy. The businesses I work with tell me what they need from government: a planning system that promptly delivers land for business development; homes that are affordable for young people alongside accessible opportunities for good quality training and skills development; an effective transport system that connects business to markets.

When those businesses look at government in Wales they are frustrated by the fog of complexity: Welsh Government operating through four regional offices which appear to be separated from, competing with, the four regional offices established by the 22 Welsh local authorities.

The new Plaid Cymru Government will create a new national economic agency which may be just another layer alongside the Welsh Government, the competing regional offices and the local authorities.

The new Government has much to do in clarifying how it intends to foster economic activity; implementing a simple, accessible and accountable apparatus for achieving those intentions.

Public administration in Labour Wales has become characterised by thousands of complex and pervasive grants for specific purposes.

Every time there was an election a new Government would have its detailed manifesto, often followed by a muti party agreement, setting out objective after objective.

As minister followed minister, the list of objectives would grow. For each objective a civil servant would be appointed to administer a specific grant. Throughout all public and voluntary organisations the key public administrators are those who ‘hunt the grant’, making the applications, spending and accounting for the grant funded expenditure.

Civil servants

Armies of civil servants dispensing the grants work alongside parallel armies of administrators applying for the same grants. It is a form of ‘clientist’ politics and public administration in which subterranean networks of professionals devise the grants, their conditions and distributions, maintaining a range of jobs but only accidentally meeting any needs

The result is that public organisations are distracted from engaging with their citizens, distracted from asking what citizens need and designing actions derived from user needs. When the citizen then asks “why are you doing this instead of that”, the answer is that the grant specifies what the civil servant claims the minister wants; the engagement with citizens and communities becomes redundant. Not surprisingly we find another reason why citizens vote in frustration and against the established ways of doing government.

The new Welsh Government will soon announce a legislative programme. The Senedd will claim all the constitutional flummery of legislatures around the world.

Plaid Cymru should tread very carefully.

Focussed

Effective governments are clear and focussed on their strategic intention, defining what they want to achieve. They are creative in devising programmes of action to support those intentions, meticulously linking action with outcome.

They fund those programmes in budgets which link expenditure with intention. They identify the programme leaders and motivate the people who will deliver.

They test the administrative capacities to deliver those programmes, set the objectives, the performance indicators and constantly challenge performance. Passing laws places boundaries on the actions of individuals and organisations but only rarely does this support the delivery of public services. Legislation is usually a huge distraction consuming masses of resource, attention and political capital to little positive, sometimes negative, effect.

Past Labour Governments have consistently misused the legislative tool.

Rutger Bergman, the most recent Reith lecturer, argues that social democratic governments throughout Europe, which he supports, have lost the capacity to deliver.

He could have been writing specifically about government in Wales when he wrote “We’ve trained a whole new class, not of builders and creators, but of compliance officers, ESG auditors, sustainability verifiers and data protection consultants. Regulate before you innovate, supervise before you create.”

This must change. Our new Government must put action before compliance.

Local Development Plan

For the past four years in Monmouthshire we have had a core strategic intention to build 2000 homes, half of which will be affordable, mainly social rented, all of which will be net zero carbon, all of which will be walkable into town.

It will transform the County’s economy, our demography and well-being. To achieve this we need a new Local Development Plan but the process of creating that plan takes far too long, a minimum of five years, often decades.

I estimate that providing development plans for the whole of Wales requires over 1000 professional planner years.

Having the vision is essential, sharing that vision with local communities is a necessary and rewarding task but the over legalistic and over professionalised process of land use planning needs radical review if Wales and its new Government are to succeed.

Too often, Labour Governments have allowed professional interests to over-ride the interests of people and communities. When this happens, as Rutger Bergman argues, people turn against social democracy.

All of this business of government is hard – matching resources and action to intention; ensuring engagement, popular support and understanding; identifying leaders and motivating people; matching empowerment with accountability.

When the going gets tough, what do weak governments do? They reorganise administrative structures in some fantasy that government would be less hard if the administrative vessels, the ships of state, had a different shape.

Plaid, please do not go there. It is always, always a substitute to real government, an excuse to do nothing and achieve nothing.

Precarious

The devolution of political power to the local communities and nations of the United Kingdom is a precious but precarious thing.

The British state has for at least a millennium shared power rarely, grudgingly, under duress; and then steadily, steadfastly, silently proceeded to grab that power back.

The UK Governments led by Johnson and Starmer, in their different ways, supported the slide of power back to Whitehall. The new Plaid Cymru Government will need to resist the growing loss of power even before it makes the case for enhancing the political powers held in Wales.

Currently many people in Wales appear indifferent to where political decisions are made. Many voted for Reform which can be reasonably defined as a centralising English Nationalist Party.

The challenge to our new Welsh Government is to govern well and, whilst doing so, constantly explain why the best choices have been made only because they are choices made in Wales.

Paul Griffiths is Deputy Leader of Monmouthshire County Council and was a Senior Special Adviser to the Welsh Government, 2000-2008