The Mark Drakeford interview: 'I don't agree with the Treasury'
I sat down with Wales' former First Minister
Bore da,
Today’s newsletter is based around an analysis of an interview I conducted with former First Minister of Wales (now finance minister) Mark Drakeford.
He appeared on my podcast For Wales, See Wales and his answers were insightful and often, seemingly contradictory to wider Labour policy.
For those of you who like my podcast we will be doing a live show at Cardiff’s Glee Club on March 2. Subscribers to this newsletter can get 20% off with the code FWSW20 at checkout. Tickets available here.
Before we go any further, I would like to share a few words from our excellent sponsor who is so important to supporting this newsletter.
This newsletter is sponsored by Hello Starling. A proudly Welsh company, Hello Starling plan and buy media, backed by data, which is designed to get maximum attention and measurable results. They specialise in getting eyes on your organisation, product and website. If you are looking to get a return on investment, a change in perception, more visitors, more subscriptions, a bigger audience or a happier audience, I highly recommend you check them out here. In doing so you help support this newsletter.
Voters to be able to boot out misbehaving Senedd Members
Before we look at Drakeford I want to draw attention to what is a significant missed opportunity which underscores the issues with the new voting system that will be used in the 2026 Senedd election.
The Senedd’s Standards of Conduct Committee has drawn up proposals that would create a new ‘recall’ system whereby voters can vote to remove an MS who seriously breaches the code of conduct.
Currently, if a member is found to have broken the code of conduct on behaviour they can be suspended but not removed from the Welsh Parliament altogether (this is different to Westminster where they can be removed).
A good recent example of this is the Plaid MS Rhys ab Owen who was suspended for inappropriately touching two women on a night out but couldn’t be removed.
So what’s the problem?
Well, while it is obviously a good thing that politicians who breach rules can now be booted out, the way they are replaced just reinforces the ridiculous electoral system that has been introduced.
If you want to understand the new electoral system you can read the newsletter where we spoke about it back in October (as well as pointing out what a gift the new system is to Nigel Farage). In simple terms the new system is a closed party list. This means that voters don’t vote for a candidate, they vote for a party. The parties submit a list of six candidates for a constituency. If they get 50% of the vote, their first three candidates will get a seat.
With the new recall it means that if a politician is booted out, the next candidate is simply the next person on that party’s list.
Let’s look at a hypothetical situation. Imagine Reform (though this could be any party) has an MS that acts inappropriately. They are then recalled and booted out by the voters. Those same voters will have no choice over who replaces them. It will just be the next Reform candidate on the list. So there is no electoral consequence for fielding that candidate for Reform or perhaps failing to deal with the issue properly. Often when an MP is recalled, the party that they represented loses the subsequent by-election, this can’t happen under this new system.
The director of the Electoral Reform Society Cymru Jess Blair said that “this system is designed to improve accountability, that will actually undermine it".
She added:
"In any job, bad behaviour should have consequences and with trust in politics and politicians at record lows, giving the public the option to recall an MS that has not upheld standards is the right thing to do.
"Yet, voters are once again at risk of losing out without the ability to choose who replaces their MS. Rather than a by-election, if a Member is recalled, the seat would go to the next person on that party's list at the previous election. This seriously limits accountability and could lead to a scenario where the public feel a party has been rewarded for the bad actions of one of its members.”
New waiting list data
Before we go into the Drakeford interview I want to just draw attention to the latest Welsh NHS waiting list data that came out last week. This provides really important context to the questions I asked the finance minister (who was the health minister for many years).
The graph below shows Welsh NHS waiting list lengths:
You will notice that everything is going up. The purple line at the bottom represents people who have waited over two years for an appointment. There are no two year waits in England.
The number of two year waits has gone up very slightly from October to November and is over 24k. The Welsh Gov has said it will be down to 8k by the spring. Now it is worth pointing out that the injection of £50m by the Welsh Gov didn’t happen until November so we won’t see the result of that yet.
The Mark Drakeford interview
There are a lot of reasons to criticise Mark Drakeford for decisions he has made (and not made). Whatever your opinions on his policies and record as a politician, I feel pretty confident saying that the bloke has a strong moral compass.
Though this should be a prerequisite for politicians, over the last week we have seen that this is far from the industry standard. This doesn’t mean that I think he has performed well overall as a politician, but I do believe that his overall goal in being a politician is to make Wales better.
His answers were simultaneously insightful and frustrating. Insightful because they shone a light on potential remedies for the issues that Wales faces but frustrating because one is left wondering “why haven’t you done more to fix these”.
As I usually do with these interviews I will go through his answers and assess what we can interpret from them.
“Wales needs fewer hospitals”
When I asked him why the NHS was performing so badly Mr Drakeford, perhaps unsurprisingly, pointed to the cuts the Conservatives imposed on Welsh budgets. When I asked him what is needed to fix the health service he said:
“Well, If you're asking me, if I had a blank sheet of paper and could just do the things I think needed to be done, we would have fewer hospitals in Wales. We have too many hospitals and too many beds.”
“That is the truth. Secondary care, as it's called, the hospital sector, sucks the resources in the health service, and yet, nine out of 10 contacts between the individual and the health service happens in primary care, in your GP surgery. Nine out of 10! But the money is not nothing like that. The money is sucked into the hospital sector because it's so expensive to run. So the first thing I would say is we are over hospitalised in Wales.”
When I asked him why he couldn’t make these changes he said: “Well, you try proposing that a hospital in Wales closes" before adding that they needed to convince people that the changes were needed.
There are a few points to make here:
Wales has below average critical care capacity compared to other developed European countries. While there is a strong argument to be made for drastically changing how healthcare is delivered it is worth noting that Wales is actually quite poorly served for ICU beds compared to other countries. This was a big issue in the pandemic.
Does Eluned Morgan agree? Speaking recently in the Senedd the First Minister Eluned Morgan told the new Welsh Tory leader "we'd have loved to have built a few more hospitals” but the Tories had previously given them barely any increase in money. This does seem somewhat at odds with Mr Drakeford, although the FM has also spoken about the need to have more community based services (it’s almost as if they will say anything to get through tough questions isn’t it?).
The excuses aren’t good enough. I think the most frustrating thing from the interview wasn’t that the NHS was struggling, it was that he felt he knew the remedy but hadn’t done it. Yes it is very hard to make changes but that is what proper political leadership is. You need to convince the public and take them with you. Of course there are challenges with this but ultimately that is their job. Mark Drakeford has often said that political capital is to be spent not saved, well he was health minister for a long time, where better to spend it?
“I don’t agree with the Treasury” - the relationship between UK and Welsh Labour
What was particularly illuminating was Drakeford’s comments around his relationship with Keir Starmer’s UK Government.
I remember in his final conference speech as First Minister, Mark Drakeford stood next to Starmer and the shadow Welsh sec Jo Stevens and called on a future Labour Government to be bold. He loudly and passionately extolled the virtues of bringing in a proportional voting system to replace first-past-the-post. It was the only part of his speech that Starmer didn’t applaud.
There are mutterings of discontent within Welsh Labour that there hasn’t been enough forthcoming from their comrades in London since they took power six months ago.
When I asked Mr Drakeford what he would like to be forthcoming from the UK Government he said:
“There's a list of things that it seems to me are particularly Welsh Labour, where we are going to have to work hard to persuade our colleagues in London that these are the right things [to do].”
“On my list of things would be HS2, which is a scandal, isn't it? That a railway line that is entirely in England and has no beneficial impact for Wales, that it's treated as though it was an England and Wales project, and we get no benefit as a result.”
“The Treasury remains adamant that they've interpreted the rules in the right way, and that there's nothing wrong here. Well, I don't agree with that, and we will continue to challenge that.”
He added:
“I think the Crown Estate should be devolved to Wales, as it is in Scotland, and that would give us a better opportunity in Wales to take advantage of our natural resources in an era where renewable energy is the future of the globe. Wales is so well placed in that, yet we lack control over one of the really big things that would allow you to make the most of that.”
There is a lot here to unpack:
The Treasury remains adamant that they've interpreted the rules in the right way. This is a curious statement given that Welsh and UK Labour have been briefing that Wales can expect some recompense for the HS2 scandal. The fact that the Treasury is saying that the interpretation is correct leads me to be even more sure that Wales will not be getting the full amount it is owed. It also makes the case even more strongly that the current system whereby funds are allocated will never work for Wales. The injustice of HS2 is plain for everyone to see.
The fact that the Treasury can still interpret HS2 as a Welsh project shows how broken their formula is. If this is not remedied in the spending review it will leave the claims that Wales will benefit from “two governments at either end of the M4” very hollow.
Why is there such a disconnect in messaging on the Crown Estate? For those of you who don’t know, the Crown Estate is land owned by the royals but the money generated from it goes to the Treasury. In Scotland that money goes to the Scottish Government but in Wales it goes to London. This is even more frustrating as Wales will soon be seeing lots of offshore wind energy being developed which will create a lot of cash. Yet unlike Scotland, we are not allowed access to that.
Mark Drakeford says that he believes that this money should go to Wales. Eluned Morgan has consistently said that she was lobbying the UK Gov for that control. However just last week Darren Jones, the UK Government Treasury spokesman, responded to their question from Plaid’s Ynys Mon MP Llinos Medi saying:
"The UK Government has had no discussions with the Welsh Government on devolving the Crown Estate.
It is pretty clear that whatever the aims of the Welsh Gov, the UK gov has no intention of devolving the Crown Estate.”
How is Drakeford going to get his budget through?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Will Hayward Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.