Welsh Labour's pointless exercise

Plus the Senedd asks for a 16% budget increase...

Hello! 

Welcome to the new incarnation of the newsletter.

A big thanks to all those who have followed me over from the previous newsletter with WalesOnline and thank you to all those people who have signed up for the first time. 

In just six days we now have almost 900 subscribers. The support has blown me away and has given me great faith that it wasn’t insane to make this move. I am particularly grateful for the kind souls who have put their hands in their pockets to support me, with a special shout out to those who have donated beyond the minimum amount to try and make this newsletter as good as we can.

And I use the word “we” because I think the great strength of this venture is that it is directly funded and guided by people who live in, care about and/or want to better understand Wales. In that vein if you have topics, issues or tips for what I should be covering please send it along. 

What it’s all about 

The premise for this newsletter is essentially that Wales is a wonderful country. But there are serious shortcomings in terms of how we are governed and this has led to complex and entrenched issues. The aim of this newsletter is to shine a light on these problems and hold decision makers to account. 

If you want to understand more about what challenges Wales faces I have written this piece which lays out in really easy to understand terms just what the current situation in Cymru is. This is basically my frame of reference for the newsletters going forward. 

The final thing I would say before we crack on is, that if you know anyone who you think would be interested in this newsletter, you can refer or gift them a subscription.

Right, let’s get into this!

Welsh NHS woes

There is nowhere else to start than with the Welsh health service. For the last month or so, Wales’ new First Minister Eluned Morgan has been conducting a “listening exercise”. This resulted in the FM coming to the conclusion that people in Wales were most worried about the health service.

Now it is perhaps surprising that Eluned Morgan needed to spend over a month “listening” to realise that the health service was in desperate straits given that for the three years previous to this she was the health minister in charge of the health service. 

Indeed back when she took over the health minister job in 2021 she reassured the Welsh public that waits of over two years for procedures would be eliminated by 2023. Alas we are now in 2024 and the waiting list numbers almost 24,000 (the number in England is basically zero).

This is the current situation in terms of waiting lists: 

• 2 year waits - 23,830 (in 2013 it was 31)

• Over a year for 1st appointment - 71,720 (in 2013 it was 25)

• Over a year for any appointment - 164,256 (in 2013 it was 113)

Now of course, for over a decade, Wales has had its budgets cut in real terms by successive Conservative governments in Westminster. But there are clear issues with management in the Welsh NHS which fall squarely at the feet of the Welsh Government. 

“So guys, I have done a lot of listening and guess what?! The health service isn’t working very well”

Looking at data is all very well but let me give you a real life example which is a microcosm of the chaos that our overstretched and beleaguered health service finds itself in. I give to you - “the madness of the meeting rooms”.

University Hospital of Wales (UHW) in Cardiff is the largest hospital in Wales as well as being the third largest university hospital in the UK. I have had multiple sources confirm to me that it is now not possible to book meeting rooms in the hospital because of a change in system. In simple terms, the old system of booking was removed a month ago and an alternative hasn't been put in place. 

This means that if someone wants to book a meeting room for any reason they can't. So if you have a disciplinary meeting, or want to bring a team together to plan a strategy, you simply can’t book anywhere in advance. This means that people are simply putting their stuff in meeting rooms to lock them down for the whole day in the hope it will stop anyone else from using it. I have heard that people are paying the sports centre on the site £50 an hour to book their rooms just to be sure they can have a space. 

This is bananas. Imagine being an NHS manager in Cardiff. You are facing crazy levels of pressure but can’t even bring people together in person to plan and facilitate a proper response as they can’t book a meeting room!

When I went to Cardiff and Vale Health Board about this they said:

“A number of meeting rooms at the University Hospital of Wales are leased and managed by Cardiff University. These meeting rooms have been identified as being primarily utilised by the Health Board, and conversations are ongoing around how these spaces are managed going forward. The Health Board is currently working closely with colleagues in Medical Education to introduce an alternative booking system until a long term solution has been found.”

Now of course anyone who has worked in any organisation knows that frustrating stuff like this happens from time to time. But I regularly have Welsh NHS staff approach me and complain that there are basic issues in management and governance within the health services on a regular basis which prevent them from effectively responding to what is widely acknowledged to be a crisis in our health service. This isn’t just Cardiff and Vale, it's all across Wales.

If this made you fear for the future of the health service, fear not! Labour have listened and they have a plan. Announced during their party conference the plan is that NHS England will help Wales work through its waiting list backlog while Wales will help by sharing their good practice in dentistry. Now I don’t want to be miserable but this isn’t the magic bullet they seem to think it is. 

Firstly, though England has almost no two year waits this does mean that all is rosy west of Offa’s Dyke. The latest Referral to Treatment (RTT) figures for July in England show:

• Waiting list stood at 7.62 million cases, consisting of approximately 6.39 million individual patients waiting for treatment 

• Around 3.14 million of these patients have been waiting over 18 weeks;

• Almost 290,300 of these patients have been waiting over a year for treatment

• The median waiting time for treatment is0 14 weeks – almost double the pre-COVID median wait of 7.5 weeks in July 2019.

And it is hard to see why Wales is being held up as this beacon of dentistry given that only 44.8% of people in Wales received treatment through an NHS dentist in 2023.

Why won’t they take responsibility?

I have conducted dozens of interviews with Welsh Government ministers in recent years regarding shortcomings in Welsh public services, most commonly regarding the Welsh NHS. The thing that I always find most striking is the way they try to distance themselves from stuff that is unequivocally their responsibility.