What will Wales be like in 2020?

While all eyes are on the 2015 General Election, a new, innovative project is looking ahead to the date of the next one, 2020.

Over the next three months, we will be taking a look at the social, economic, environmental and constitutional trends which will shape Wales over the next five years.

If we look back, we can see the dramatic changes that have taken place since 2010 – reports written then seem as if from another era. They still talk about LCOs and Assembly Measures, austerity meant the 1940s not the 21st century, and nobody had heard of zero hours contracts.

2020 was also often seen as some sort of nirvana – the date when child poverty would be eradicated, a 40% reduction in green house gases achieved, and the smoking rate would be just 16%, to name only a few. All kinds of strategies and policies stop in 2020 as well – from the latest round of EU funding to strategies for tourism, food, major events and health – even the latest education strategy ‘Qualified for Life‘ covers the period to, yes, 2020.

But if the next five years bring as much change as the last five, these targets and strategies could be in trouble.

The scale and extent of change has been such that many organisations have and still are struggling to understand and deal with them. As the Wales Public Services 2025 project recently noted, “there is no road-map or ready-made solution” to the challenges ahead, and to date there are few examples of organisations making fundamental changes in what they do and how they do it.  For some organisations, the failure to adapt has brought the ultimate penalty – closure.  The Valleys Race Equality Council, the Wales Arts Review, the Institute for Rural Health and five Rathbone centres are just a few of the third sector organisations to put the shutters up in recent months (although the Wales Arts Review has relaunched).

Irrespective of whoever wins the election in a few weeks time, Wales will continue to change.

Our project aims to equip people and organisations with the information they need to chart a course over the next few years.  we will review forecasts and outlooks for the population, the economy, social change and governance, and consider how they might affect Wales.  We are all too aware of the perils of gazing into a crystal ball.  But our project will be more robust than that – we do accept that not everything can been foreseen – the recent collapse in oil prices being a case in point. But other challenges are foreseeable – at least in broad brush if not fine detail.

The findings will complement the recent work undertaken by the Commissioner for Sustainable Futures on ‘the Wales we want’.  While that project focused on the kind of economy and society that people would like to see, the Bevan Foundation’s project considers the Wales that people might actually get – unless things change.

Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation

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