The Daily Telegraph - Features
Stagnant economy, sickly healthcare, soaring taxes – what a Labour government really looks like According to Keir Starmer, the Welsh administration provides a ‘blueprint’ for what the party can do across the UK. But the figures show what a disaster that w
Ollie Corfe
Merthyr Tydfil was an astute choice of location for Nigel Farage to launch the Reform UK manifesto. Once known as the “iron capital” of the world, the town in south Wales is emblematic of those parts of the country that feel left behind by modern politicians.
Farage entered the election fray with the intention of burying the Conservatives. But part of his pitch is to become the “real opposition to a Labour government”.
Where better, therefore, for the Reform leader to get this message across and launch his “contract” with the people than at the run-down Gurnos social club, whose dilapidated state stands as a pebble-dashed monument to Welsh Labour’s dire record in the Senedd ever since executive and legislative functions were first devolved to the nation in 1999.
As one resident rather unkindly says: “In Merthyr, everyone’s dressed for the gym but nobody’s going.”
Sir Keir Starmer’s bid for power in Westminster rests on promises to boost economic growth, fixing the NHS, improving access to housing, raise exam results and invest heavily in green energy – all without raising taxes (much).
But Labour in Wales has presided over a stagnant economy, a crumbling NHS, soaring house prices, dire education results and poor environmental outcomes – all while hiking council tax far more than other parts of the country. In 2022, Starmer said that the Welsh Government provided a “blueprint for what Labour can do across the UK”. He might want to rethink that. Over two decades of Labour rule appear to have done little to boost Wales’s fortunes. Take the economy, for instance. At the turn of the millennium, GDP per capita in the country – total economic output divided among the population, the most common indicator of living standards – was £13,121. This figure, adjusted for inflation, was lower than every other constituent part of the UK, and 14 per cent shy of the average for the entire country, according to the Office for National Statistics. In large part, this reflects the nation’s industrial decline in the latter half of the 20th century, when coal mining and steel production slumped. But under
successive Labour administrations since, Wales has struggled to shake off the malaise, build decent infrastructure or develop modern skills.
Its economy grew by 124 per cent between 1999 and 2022. This compares with 139 per cent in Scotland, 143 per cent in England and 154 per cent in Northern Ireland. Since 2018, the Welsh economy has shrunk by 1 per cent, while England’s has grown by
2 per cent. All parts of the UK are suffering from poor productivity but Wales is doing worse than almost every other region.
As the Welsh Economic Review recently concluded: “Wales has a chronic and severe problem of low productivity. It has a severe and persistent productivity gap with other UK nations and regions, and with other global competitors.”
But while the Welsh Government might, like its counterpart in Westminster, claim that extenuating circumstances and outside pressures have stymied the economy, there are no such excuses for the state of the hospitals and schools in Wales.
The UK’s devolved authorities were handed wide-ranging control over healthcare in 1999. And yet Wales underperforms England in a range of metrics.
In March this year, the average wait for treatment in Wales after referral was 21.8 weeks, compared with 14.9 weeks in England. And nearly 5 per cent of Welsh patients have to wait over two years before receiving treatment compared with just 0.01 per cent of English patients.
In recent years, the NHS has adopted a similar target for A&E waiting times in different parts of the country: 95 per cent of arrivals should be treated within four hours. NHS Wales has failed to meet this goal at any point during the past decade. Between 2012 and last year, the annual average proportion of patients at major A&E units admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours fell from 87 per cent to 56.5 per cent – a steeper decline than in any other UK nation.
Andrew RT Davies, leader of the Welsh Conservatives, accused the Welsh Labour government of having mismanaged the NHS for 25 years. “We have the longest waiting lists in the UK and they’ve just hit a new record high,” he said.
“Labour still refuses to pass on the full uplift Wales receives for the NHS as a result of health spending in England [receiving £1.20 for every £1 spent in England], preferring to syphon funds off to pay for 20mph speed limits or creating more politicians.
“So it is no wonder that waiting times and health outcomes are so abysmal in Labour-run Wales.”
Adding to the sense of despair, life expectancy at birth in Wales has increased by just 29 months between 2001 and 2020, while in England it has risen by 34 months.
But, if anything, Welsh Labour’s record on education may be even more damning. Wales first participated in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) in 2006. Back then, the nation scored lowest in the UK, 3.2 percentage points below the average.
Fast-forward to the latest iteration, published at the end of last year, and the gap among 15-year-olds in Wales and England had doubled from 11 to 26 performance points – the widest disparity in a decade.
While many countries had declining scores as a result of the pandemic, Wales’s drop was particularly precipitous, erasing all progress since 2012. Damningly, the performance of disadvantaged children in England was either above or similar to the average for all children in Wales.
The Welsh teachers’ union, NAHT Cymru, has blamed reductions in funding from central government in Westminster for the crisis, highlighting that real-terms spending on schools has fallen by around 6 per cent between 2009-10 and 2023-24.
However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the differences in educational performance between England and Wales are unlikely to be explained by differences in resources and spending, “[as] spending per pupil is similar in the two countries”. It added that a more likely explanation was “long-standing differences in policy and approach, such as lower levels of external accountability and less use of data”.
The IFS highlighted that there were worse post-16 educational outcomes in Wales, with a higher share of young people not in education, employment or training than in the rest of the UK. It also had lower levels of participation in higher education (particularly among boys) and lower levels of employment and earnings for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
All the while, council tax has risen faster in Wales in the past 25 years than in other parts of the UK. Between 1999-2000 and 2024-25, average Band D rates, the benchmark set by local authorities, soared by 236.4 per cent in Wales, compared with 172 per cent in England and 67 per cent in Scotland.
In large part, this can be attributed to the greater flexibility that the unitary authorities of Wales have to raise such rates. In England, since 2012, councils have been required to hold a referendum among the local electorate for “excessive” increases above 4.99 per cent.
No such rule exists in Wales, and every single one of the nation’s 22 councils breached this threshold last year. Average bills in monetary terms remain higher in England (£2,171) than in Wales (£2,024), but the gap is closing fast.
Wales is even struggling to make headway in its much-vaunted commitment to the environment. In 2021, the Senedd formally matched the UK Government’s pledge to reach net zero by 2050.
By the end of 2021, the latest year for which figures are available, Wales had reduced its emissions to 64.6 per cent of what it was belching out in 1990. However, England and Scotland have achieved better results, reducing emissions to about 50 per cent of 1990 levels.
While the Climate Change Committee (CCC), Westminster’s independent advisory body on climate, lauded the Welsh Government’s decision last year to cancel all major road projects on environmental grounds – notably shelving plans for a third bridge over the Menai Strait – its latest report highlighted “insufficient” tangible progress “in many areas that are dependent on Welsh Government policy powers”.
It stated: “Most notably, tree-planting rates and peatland restoration rates are far too low, and development of the charging infrastructure needed to support the transition to electric vehicles is not happening quickly enough.”
A flagship policy to cut speed limits from 30mph to 20mph in built-up areas such as village and town centres has made little difference to air quality, according to research published in May.
Chris Stark, the CCC’s chief executive, warned of a worrying “gap” between ambition and delivery in Wales: “In the past, we might have talked about how Wales is one of the best places in the UK for recycling – we’ve tried to hand out the praise,” he said. “But now when we look forward that’s not going to be enough. In those areas where they have the powers, we’re just not seeing Welsh ministers put their shoulder to the wheel and put in place the policies that will achieve the legal targets.”
The Telegraph contacted Welsh Labour for comment. The party had not responded by the time of publication.
‘Wales has a chronic and severe problem of low productivity’