The campaign is over. Now comes the hard part: A former minister on what governing Wales really takes

Lee Waters

So, the campaign is over – and now comes the hard part; If you think forming a Government is tricky, try running one in the age of the Polycrisis!

There are multiple crises all happening at the same time, and the Welsh Government has neither the levers, capacity, nor financial firepower to make more than a dent in any of them. But don’t worry, this is not a counsel of despair. It’s a case for focus.

So, what can be changed, and what is out of the control of an incoming Welsh Government Minister? I am neither religious, nor an addict, but during my decade in politics I turned more than once to Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Serenity Prayer’: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference’.

First off, we need to acknowledge the stark reality – times are hard and aren’t going to get better anytime soon. The extra funding the Welsh Government can expect over the next five years amounts to just 0.7% extra every year in real terms. And grimmer still, the budget for building things is set to fall by almost 9% in real terms over the course of the Senedd term.

If you think that’s bad, remember that while the money is tight the demand for public services keeps growing. NHS spending has been growing at 3.6% a year and Ministers will find it hard not to match increases in health care made in other parts of the UK. That means other parts of the Welsh Government budget will be squeezed to allow health to meet growing demand. The analysts at Cardiff University’s Wales Fiscal Analysis team have calculated that spending other than health will have to be cut by 2.7% every year of the coming Senedd term.

And on top of that there’s the yet unknown (but expected) impact on inflation and economic growth of the energy shock caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

So, against that backdrop how can any incoming set of Ministers meet the mood for change? How can voters feel an improvement in the services they receive by the time of the next elections in four years’ time?

I’ve been working with a team at digital specialists Perago in Swansea to dig into their experiences of working with Welsh public services over the last decade to come up with some constructive and practical suggestions to help the new team of Ministers with their challenges.

There are no magic bullets, but even with tight budgets there are things that can be done to make services better. Admittedly these are marginal gains, but they aid efficacy of what Government is trying to do as well as its efficiency.

Sweat your assets

When you haven’t got more to work with the first question to ask is ‘how can we make better use of what we’ve already got?’

Let’s take one example of where there is duplicated effort. Each of Wales’ Local Authorities administers its own Council Tax Reduction Scheme. The Council Tax Benefit offers a discount on bills for around 261,000 low-income households. Each of the 22 Councils implements its own version of the same scheme, even though the eligibility criteria are set centrally by the Welsh Government.

And these are Councils that are struggling. The Auditor General for Wales has warned that “one or two” councils are very close to bankruptcy, and the Wales Centre for Public Policy says the current model of local government is “no longer sustainable”. While there is no consensus on a whole system change Perago’s Strategy and Transformation Director Tim Daley offers up an uncontroversial candidate to make better use of what you’ve got.

From its HQ in Merthyr the Welsh Revenue Authority has proven itself as an efficient tax collecting body. The arm’s length unit set up by the Welsh Government to handle its new tax raising powers already collects Stamp Duty (Land Transaction Tax) and Landfill Disposals Tax for the whole of Wales. So why not get it to do more?

Doing this ‘once for Wales’ would not just be a cost-cutting exercise but would help better co-ordinate a Welsh tax and benefits system by looking at policy and operations together, rather than in sequence. Based on deep experience of working in changing the way public services work Tim Daley, Strategy and Transformation Director at Perago, explains in his piece “It means users, policymakers and operators looking at the same system, with the same data in front of them, asking the same question early: will this actually work when it reaches the person it is meant to serve? That is not glamorous work. It does not generate press releases. It is the work that makes the press releases true.”

Reduce friction

Most of the spending on public services is spent on hiring staff. Incoming Ministers are going to struggle to hire many more in current conditions, so how do we make the most of the public servants that we have?

The potential to free up frontline staff from routine tasks to be able to focus on more complex cases is untapped. The success five years ago of Caerphilly Council in redirecting the efforts of its catering service from administering forms to helping on the frontline by automating the process for applying for free school meals still hasn’t been scaled. It needs to be done, and the approach has wider potential too.

An obvious candidate is easing teacher workload and giving them their Sunday’s back. Teachers in Wales work an average of 56 hours a week so it’s not surprising nearly three‑quarters say they have seriously thought about quitting in the last year. AI has been shown to free up teacher time by helping with routine admin tasks, and many schools now use digital tools for tasks such as lesson planning. But as Estyn has recognised there needs to be a coherent national approach to AI in schools.

But let’s not get carried away by the hype – the devil is in the details. The software being used by teachers across Wales is not designed for the Curriculum for Wales. As digital specialist Chris Elias has highlighted, a Welsh teacher using tools built for the National Curriculum for England, for US Common Core, is doing the bridging work themselves, in their head, on top of everything else. And at around £7 per teacher per month Welsh schools could already be spending £1 million a year on AI software that is simply displacing one task with another.

Every party in the Senedd campaign pledged to cut classroom paperwork but to make the pledge effective there needs to be attention on the infrastructure needed to get the potential out of the technology – this applies to other public services too.

Wales led the way in creating Hwb, the national online platform for schools which offers free tools such as Microsoft 365, Google Classroom, and bilingual learning resources. It not only saves money by covering the software use with one centrally bargained licence, but it reshapes the way services are delivered too. As Chris Elias puts it, “Being asked first what learners should take away from a lesson shift planning from coverage to purpose, connecting intent to curriculum in a way that feels supportive rather than bureaucratic. Planning sharpens. Sunday evenings quieten”

This shows what’s possible when digital tools are built for the system they serve. The question is whether Wales builds the infrastructure to scale this approach—or leaves teachers or other public servants to keep bridging the gap alone. AI designed for Wales could free up time, improve retention and sharpen practice. A new government may agree with that in principle, but delivery depends on having the right digital capability and system wiring in place. Ambition alone will not be enough.

Turn a potential crisis into an opportunity  

We should 100% harness productivity tools. But let’s not be native, AI is not just an opportunity, left unharnessed it is also a threat.

Approximately 30,000 people in Wales work in call centres, with towns such as Swansea heavily reliant on service‑sector employment. Advances in AI are now rapidly automating routine service roles, placing those jobs under threat. The roles created to absorb the losses of deindustrialisation are now facing disruption themselves.

This tension, between past economic strategy and present technological momentum, sits at the heart of the challenge confronting the next Welsh Government.

A short-term dash to automation risks undermining long‑term economic value to organisations. Workers in contact centres aren’t just call-handlers, they know the business and the customers better than any algorithm. They understand what callers really mean beneath the words they use, and where public service systems break down in practice. They hold ‘domain expertise’ that takes years to accumulate and underpins trust, service quality, and organisational resilience. They also know how to calm a situation before it becomes a complaint, and which cases need a human and which don’t.

This ‘tacit knowledge’ can’t be taught in a training module or captured in computer code. It’s built through thousands of conversations, over years, and it lives in the people who’ve had them. As AI takes on simpler routine calls, the remaining work becomes harder and more emotionally complex – exactly where human judgement is most valuable. Handled well, this concentrates value. Handled badly, the very knowledge needed to make advanced systems work is lost, lowering service quality and increasing costs downstream. When organisations shed that workforce too quickly, they are not just reducing headcount; they are liquidating productive assets.

Not every worker will transition smoothly. Some roles will disappear, and not everyone wants or can pivot into more complex positions. Because public policy helped create these jobs, government has a responsibility to support those affected. Options like retraining, transition funds, shorter working weeks, or income guarantees are difficult – but so is absorbing the social and economic costs of unmanaged displacement.

Call centres are just the first test case. Retail, logistics and professional services will follow, with the same choice each time: cut costs fast or preserve hard-won knowhow. As Emma Northcote, Head of Research and Engagement at Perago, puts it, “The coming decade will shape Welsh communities for a generation. Treating AI as a knowhow challenge, not just a cost‑cutting exercise, offers a path to a fairer and more resilient future.”

Incoming Ministers will need to make proactive moves to chart a course to put us on that path. The problem may not yet have maximum viability but it’s coming, and the window for intervention is already closing.

A proactive and ethical approach to automation which values the know-how of staff could help sharpen Welsh public services and show how age-old Welsh values we’ve spent a long-time sentimentalising can be applied in the AI age.

Governing in prose

The saying of the former New York Mayor Mario Cuomo has now reached the status of cliche, but there’s a reason for that: it’s true that ‘You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.’

In the constrained choices of the age of the Polycrisis the poetry has become more than a little strained, but the need to focus on the drier task of policy design and implementation is more important than ever. I took a close interest in digital when I was in Government not because I am interested in tech (I am not), but because of the discipline that digital culture applies to service design to put the needs of the end user at the centre. Think about how you as a consumer experience service from Amazon versus your experience with your local council or school.

“There’s plenty not to like about the digital giants, but whatever you think you cannot deny that they have reset expectations of how responsive services should be. And if we want public services to keep on serving the public we must ensure they don’t fall behind. As Perago’s Head of Service Design Omar Idris, says in a must-read piece, “Wales deserves more than announcements about doing things differently. It needs the conditions that make different things possible, then the will to back them properly”.

It is hard being in Government, and the challenges facing the incoming Welsh Government are undoubtedly tough. And Ministers need the wisdom to know where they can make the difference.

Lee Waters is a former Welsh Government Minister who created the podcast series ‘Y Pumed Llawr – The Fifth Floor’. He is an Associate at Perago.