Welsh Labour’s mental health pledge sounds good. But what is actually new?

James Downs, Mental Health Campaigner

Welsh Labour has announced that, if re-elected, it will “transform mental healthcare to provide easy-to-access, same-day services so everyone can get the support they need, when they need it.” On the face of it, that sounds compassionate, practical and overdue. Of course people should be able to get help when they need it. Of course they should not be left to deteriorate while waiting for care.

But once you move past the headline, it is not clear what is actually being proposed here. Labour’s pledge appears to be less a new offer than a repackaging of commitments already contained in the Welsh Government’s mental health strategy.

Mental health in Wales does not need recycled promises. It needs clarity, ambition and delivery.

A re-announcement dressed up as a pledge

The idea of same-day support is not new. The Welsh Government’s own Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2025–2035, published last April, already said people would “increasingly have access to same-day services”, and described a goal of “same day open access to mental health care at the point of need and stage of readiness, with minimal assessment”. The accompanying delivery plan for 2025 to 2028 also commits to developing “same day” mental health support across Wales.

So when Welsh Labour now puts “same-day support” forward as a headline manifesto pledge, the obvious question is: what exactly is new here?

Is this a promise of additional funding? A national service model? New staffing? Clear waiting-time standards? Expanded rights of access? Better support outside office hours? Or is it simply a restatement of an existing commitment, now repurposed for election season?

If the answer is that same-day support will now be delivered more quickly, more consistently or on a larger scale, then Welsh Labour should say so. If it means people will be able to access meaningful support without navigating GP bottlenecks, arbitrary thresholds and endless assessment processes, then say that too. If it means proper provision for children and young people, for people with eating disorders, for neurodivergent people, for Welsh speakers, and for those with complex or long-term needs, then spell it out.

At the moment, the announcement does not do that.

Good slogans are not the same as good services

Mental healthcare is vulnerable to vague promises. It is easy to announce things like access, prevention, parity and person-centred care. It is much harder to build services that people can actually rely on.

I know this from my own experience of mental health services in Wales. In recent years I have had some excellent treatment. But I have also had periods of very poor treatment, and long periods of no care at all despite being severely unwell. There were many years when I was deemed “too unwell” for treatment, and when the specialist services I needed simply didn’t exist in Wales. This kind of inconsistency is part of the problem. Good care should not depend on luck, timing, geography, or on whether someone happens to fit the system’s idea of who can be helped.

Experiences like mine expose the gap between the language of policy and the reality of mental health support in Wales. There are good people doing very good work in our services, and there are parts of the system that have been improved. But there are also people who wait far too long, who fall between services, who are told they are too ill for one part of the system and not ill enough for another, and people whose needs become more severe while the latest well-meaning policy idea gets talked up to gain votes.

Wales could be much more ambitious than this

It is clear that Wales needs to be much more ambitious about mental health – and it can be.

We are a small country. Whilst this creates challenges, it also creates possibilities to do things differently: to be more agile, and to be truly responsive to the needs of our communities. Wales is capable of leading the way in building a coherent mental health system that is easy to access, close to home, joined up across services, and designed around the reality of people’s lives, rather than around institutional boundaries.

Achieving this means more than offering slogans about same-day support. It means investing in a system where people can get help early, without shame, and without having to prove they are ill enough to deserve care. We need to provide resources for support that does not disappear once risk drops slightly, or once someone is judged too complex, too chronic, or too inconvenient. We need to measure the outcomes of policy changes, and make sure that they actually deliver for all people equally, across the whole country in all our diversity.

We also need to be honest about the fact that access to services is not enough in and of itself. Mental health is also shaped by poverty, housing, insecurity, exclusion, and trauma. If political ambition begins and ends with getting someone through the front door faster, then it is still not ambitious enough – we have to address the drivers that cause people to need help in the first place.

What Wales needs now

If Welsh Labour wants this pledge to be taken seriously, it needs to explain what is actually different about it: not just that same-day support is a good idea, but how it will work, who it will reach, what barriers it will remove, and how people’s experience of care will materially improve.

But the bigger problem is that even if this pledge were genuinely new, it would still not be enough. Wales does not just need quicker access to a system that too often feels fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to rely on. It needs a much more ambitious vision of mental health: one that takes prevention seriously, addresses poverty and trauma, and builds services people can trust throughout their lives, not only at the point of crisis.

Wales deserves better than a vague re-announcement dressed up as ambition. We need a government willing to say plainly what good mental healthcare should look like, and then build it. Not just with warmer words, but with clear commitments, real investment, and a level of ambition that matches the scale of what people in Wales actually need.

James Downs is a mental health campaigner, researcher and expert by experience in eating disorders. He lives in Cardiff and can be contacted at @jamesldowns on X and Instagram, or via his website: jamesdowns.co.uk