Entrepreneurship has to stop being a warm paragraph at the back of an economic strategy and become a national mission.
The next Welsh Government will be decided at the polls in May.(Image: WalesOnline/ Rob Browne)
Since devolution, Wales has never been short of economic strategies, but what we have lacked is a government that turns policy into outcomes such as higher productivity, higher wages, and more growing firms.
Over the next few weeks, political parties will reveal their plans, and yet there is already an uncomfortable truth behind the Senedd election debate if previous manifestos are anything to go by: we can keep announcing new initiatives and calling them “economic action”, or we can finally build something that makes a difference.
So, what should a manifesto for the Welsh economy look like if we were serious about changing the trajectory rather than managing decline?
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First, Wales must make productivity the North Star of economic policy. Every programme should pass a simple test: how does it raise output per hour, and how will we measure it? If it can’t answer that, it should not be supported. We should also publish a monthly “Welsh economic scoreboard” because if you can’t see it, you can’t manage it, and if you never publish it, you don’t really intend to be held accountable for it.
Second, entrepreneurship has to stop being a warm paragraph at the back of an economic strategy and become a national mission. Wales won’t build resilience and prosperity without more people starting firms, more firms getting through the hard early years, and far more firms growing into large employers. That means a pipeline designed around the founder journey of starting, surviving and scaling.
Third, Wales needs to simplify the business journey by creating a single front door that actually works and stops entrepreneurs from spending time navigating programmes instead of building businesses. Start by taking the Development Bank of Wales, which has largely failed to make a real difference, and integrating its debt functions into Business Wales as was originally intended, so there is one joined-up journey from diagnosis to support to finance.
Fourth, as in other small, competitive economies such as Finland, Wales needs an Innovation, Growth and Export Agency (or as part of a wider economic development body) that behaves like an economic actor rather than a grant office. Its job should be to connect the chain from productivity diffusion (helping firms adopt better tools and processes) to commercialisation (turning ideas into products), to export and scaling (turning products into global revenues). It should also house a £200m Wales Growth Capital Fund for equity and patient finance, with independent governance and transparent reporting.
Fifth, we must be honest about the role of universities as major employers and significant economic actors. That means committing to employer-led placements, diffusion of innovation into SMEs and a serious pipeline for spinout firms. In addition, as this column has been arguing for over two decades, we need to lobby hard to ensure Wales gets its fair share of UK research and innovation funding, which could be worth hundreds of millions of pounds to the Welsh economy every year.
Sixth, skills policy must be rebuilt around jobs and wages rather than enrolments and “delivery”. We need employer-led pathways, including more apprenticeships aligned to the missions we are backing, short conversion routes into growth roles, and management capability support so firms can actually scale. But there is a point many manifestos avoid because it is politically awkward: that for a large share of Welsh households, the barrier to progressing in work isn’t motivation or training but childcare. If Wales wants higher participation and progression, especially for women, childcare must be treated as economic infrastructure rather than a separate social policy conversation.
Seventh, you can’t scale if you can’t get space, power, and permissions, and that means fast-tracking employment sites with published targets and a national business premises plan that expands affordable small units, maker space, and light industrial capacity where demand is strongest. It also means recognising the importance of housing because if workers can’t live near the jobs we are trying to create, then growth sites fail before they start.
Eighth, procurement should be treated as a growth policy as the public sector is one of Wales’ biggest levers but is often designed in ways that favour incumbency and complexity. We need “first customer” routes for SMEs, challenge-led procurement that buys solutions not paperwork, and a Made in Wales supply-chain deal where major contracts are broken into SME-accessible lots where value-for-money holds.
Ninth, net zero should be treated as an economic advantage, not just a target and for many firms, energy is now a competitiveness issue. A serious plan would prioritise measures with clear payback, including large-scale energy efficiency for SMEs, smarter energy management, and targeted support for energy-intensive sectors, alongside “decarbonisation-ready” industrial estates where shared infrastructure lowers costs. If we want net zero to stick politically, it has to make Wales cheaper to build and run.
Tenth, Wales should stop talking about tourism only in terms of visitor numbers and start designing a high-quality tourism economy that raises incomes. That means backing businesses that increase value per visitor through better accommodation, better experiences, better food and drink, and attractions that extend the season rather than relying on a few summer months.
Finally, town centres need an enterprise strategy, not nostalgia, as too much regeneration policy is still based on trying to recreate a retail model that has moved on. Wales should make it easier to start and trade locally, not only by reviewing business rates, but also by simplifying change-of-use, granting rapid pop-up and test-trade permissions, offering time-limited rate relief for new trading businesses, and creating “start-up streets” with flexible leases and shared services.
Hopefully, those political parties vying for the votes of employers and employees in Wales will stop repeating the same old policies and instead build an economy that delivers for the people of Wales. But most important of all, the next government must put Welsh businesses at the heart of every decision being made and do everything possible to give them the competitive advantage they should be getting from the devolution dividend.
