Ambition vs delivery: the next 12 months in Welsh politics

With many government targets being missed, Victoria Winckler, Director of the Bevan Foundation, asks whether it’s ambition or delivery that’s needed

It is sometimes said that the Welsh Government ‘lacks ambition’, with Wales’s many ills being attributed to this shortfall in ‘aspiration’.  

There is no shortage of allegations of a lack of vision: on housing, for example, Tai Pawb has said that the housing white paper ‘falls short on … ambition’, while the Children’s Commissioner has similarly said that the draft child poverty strategy ‘really lacks ambition’.  Farming organisations have argued that there ‘remains a lack of ambition for the future of farming in Wales’ while Wildlife Trusts Wales were ‘concerned about [the] lack of urgency and ambition’ in the Net Zero Carbon plan.  And that is to list but a few! 

But while these claims may be true in some specific areas, it is not true of all. 

The ‘lack of ambition’ sits alongside some bold aims 

In contrast to those which ‘lack ambition’, other policy areas have near-utopian aims and targets. Just look at some of the goals that the Welsh government has set itself.

In housing, it aims that homelessness should be rare, brief and unrepeated, and that 20,000 new social homes should be created by 2026. Further ahead, there are targets for 63% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030; the amount of household waste produced should fall by 33%, and 43,000 hectares of new woodland should have been created by the same date.  In health, Wales 2030 is the year by which Wales should be free of tobacco smoking, have eradicated hepatitis C cases, and see no new cases of HIV infection.  And if these are not enough, Wales should be an anti-racist nation by 2030!

These are pretty ambitious targets on any measure, and bring into question the idea that the Welsh government lacks aspiration.  

How is the Welsh government doing? 

Unfortunately the Welsh government is struggling to meet almost every one of its many ambitions. Far from being rare, homelessness now affects one in every 215 households. With just 18 months to go, just a quarter of the 20,000 new social homes target have been completed.  Less than 5% of new woodland planned has been created two years into a six year  planting programme. With five years to go, there are more than twice as many smokers than planned and the reduction in hepatitis C infections is way off target.  And the Climate Change Committee has concluded that there has not been enough progress to date to enable the 2030 net zero target to be achieved.

The slow progress is not just about milestones being missed – it affects people’s lives and, when the reality doesn’t match the rhetoric, fuels public disillusion with politics. 

The problem is not one of ambition but of delivery

Far from the Welsh government lacking ambition, it is delivery that falls woefully short.  Something is clearly going wrong in the system: the scale of the shortfall in progress is staggering, it affects multiple policy areas, and it has been going on for years.   Indeed, the creation of the role of Minister for Delivery (even though the list of her responsibilities is vague on what this entails) suggests that the Welsh government recognises that it needs to put its foot on the accelerator. 

There are many different reasons why delivery is proving so difficult. Too many policy objectives and targets are simply not achievable with the modest resources available to the Welsh government – it’s all very well wanting to halve the number of people affected by issue X, but if that means providing a service to 100,000 people and there’s only funds for 25,000 the policy is doomed to fail.

Add to this, too many policies fail to address the issue of how a policy will be implemented. This is especially important as the Welsh government is directly responsible for few services and instead delivers through a plethora of arms-length and often independent bodies. 

And as the final straw, some policies do not consider how changes in the external environment (such as changes in UK government policies or the macro-economic context) might affect delivery, or how different policies need to be aligned to achieve an objective. 

A year of delivery?

The Welsh government has a tough task ahead over the next 18 months getting back on track to achieving its targets, whether for 2026 or those which fall due in 2030 (and later).

Whoever makes up the next Welsh government will almost certainly face the same challenges of turning policy ambitions into change on the ground.  Political parties need to think about how they will keep their promises to the electorate – and that means thinking about delivery. And just to be clear, this means more than establishing more agencies, sponsored bodies or commissions! 

Without effective delivery, ambitions, aspirations or whatever you want to call them are simply hot air.