‘People in Wales shouldn’t be angry – they need to be apoplectic’

Journalist and author Will Hayward writes about the driving force behind his new book

I have covered Wales as a journalist for 10 years.

I moved here just under two decades ago and never left. I fell in love with Wales. It was the place I never realised I was looking for. It’s now my home and my whole adult life has been here.

Am I Welsh yet? I am not sure. As Plaid Cymru’s first MP Gwynfor Evans said: “Anyone can be Welsh, you just have to be willing to accept the consequences.”

Covering the politics of a nation as a journalist, I think I came to understand it in a way I wouldn’t have been able to do in another profession.

Once I started looking at issues in Wales and asking questions, I was incredibly surprised by one thing.

I wasn’t surprised at the challenges Wales faces, in our hospitals, our schools, our economy or our creaking transport system.

What really shocked me was how many people seemed to accept this was an acceptable status quo.

Time and again as a political reporter I have covered ways in which Wales has been screwed over.

It blew my mind how many people in Cymru didn’t know about how they were being shafted.

I also couldn’t get over how few people in a nation which is being repeatedly punched in the face even bothered to vote in the Senedd elections.

So I decided to write a book. It is called Who Cares About Wales? Why the Welsh Need to Get Angry.

I spent a year speaking to hundreds of people all across Wales to understand the real reasons why Cymru is relentlessly at the bottom of so many metrics.

I delved into the details of how Wales is actually funded, who actually speaks for us and why we are poor.

I couldn’t believe what I found. People in Wales shouldn’t be angry – they need to be apoplectic.

Not because of slights from 500 years ago, but because we have the worst housing, health service, educational outcomes and levels of poverty in the UK.

We need to be incandescent that the very system in which we operate is geared up so we can’t help but fail.

In so many ways we are treated worse than Scotland. We have been given responsibility without the tools to meaningfully improve our lives.

We need to be furious that we are in a system which scorns and dismisses us when it bothers to notice us at all.

And we need to reserve a special level of rage for those people elected to be our voice who are barely raising a peep at these injustices.

Within the book I look at a dozen different areas where Wales is being screwed both in Westminster and Cardiff Bay. I will break some of these down for you now.

Where the money comes from

There is not enough space here to fully outline the true scale of how Wales’ is given a raw deal when it comes to funding but let me give you an idea of how we compare to Scotland.

Perhaps the biggest illustration of how the current system sets Wales up to fail is around the ability to carry over money.

Anyone who runs a department in government or a business knows that feeling at the end of the financial year.

You were allocated X amount of money for your budget and you have a bit left with just a few weeks left in the financial year.

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This means you need to spend it fast because anything left will be taken back and you are likely to end up with a lower budget next year.

This leads to a mad rush to get money out of the door.

You pay suppliers in advance for work they might do, you buy a load of new furniture for the office or hurry through a marketing campaign. As you can imagine, this doesn’t exactly lead to value for money.

In a Welsh Government context this is a real problem.

After all, if it is important to get all your money out of the door then you are not rewarded for making good decisions.

For example, during the pandemic, the Welsh Government spent a fraction of what the UK Government did on contact tracing.

In Wales, we used councils, whereas the UK Government used large companies like Serco. In this case, doesn’t it make sense for the Welsh Government to be able to carry forward that cash for a future year?

Yes it does. That is why Wales has a thing called the Wales reserve.

Think of it as a savings account where the Welsh Government can stick money it doesn’t spend from its annual budget for next year.

Seems like a good idea, huh? Well it would be, except it is built in a way which treats Wales like a naughty teenager.

The first thing is the Welsh reserve is limited. The total the Welsh Government can have in the reserve is £350m. While that might sound like a lot, it really isn’t in a government context.

The government’s budget is £26bn. This means the Welsh reserve is just 1.35% of its budget. And that £350m isn’t per year, that is the total it can carry.

This means that if the Welsh Government reserve is full, then any money which isn’t spent is just taken back by the Treasury in Westminster.

What makes this system even worse is the UK Treasury has imposed limits on how much of its own reserves Wales can even use!

Each year the Welsh Government can only draw down (aka spend) £125m for resource spending (day-to-day administration costs) and £50m for capital spending (stuff like building a new road).

These are tiny amounts when you are talking about a whole country, £50m will barely get you anything when it comes to infrastructure.

So of that £350m, Wales can only access £175m a year.

Let’s compare Wales to Scotland when it comes to carrying over money.

Scotland has a reserve limit of £700m, double that of Wales. Now you might argue this makes sense given Scotland’s budget is more than double Wales’.

However, in Scotland there are no limits on how much it can draw down (they abolished this for Scotland in 2023) and the total increases annually with inflation.

There is simply no justification for Wales being treated differently to Scotland. The UK Government isn’t able to get away with treating Scotland like Wales because the Scottish wouldn’t stand for it.

It is the same when it comes to borrowing. While Wales is now allowed to borrow up to £1bn for capital purposes (big long-term investments on buildings and infrastructure), we also have an annual cap of £150m.

That means the Welsh Government is only allowed to borrow the equivalent of 0.58% of its budget every year.

This is severely limiting when it comes to being able to make the investments Wales so desperately needs. We have less borrowing powers than a council.

This is even more outrageous when you compare this with Scotland’s deal.

The Scottish Government can borrow up to £3bn cumulatively for capital investment, with an annual limit of £450m. But the worst part is Scotland’s limits change with inflation whereas Cymru’s are fixed for 10 years. So, Scotland not only has a better deal, it is getting cumulatively better every year.

Are you beginning to see why Wales needs to get angry yet?

Let me give you one more example when it comes to how we are funded.

One of the biggest areas Wales is getting short-changed is in research and development (R&D) spending.

In the east/south-east of England and London, there was £1,406 of R&D spending per person. This is 42% above the national average which is £987.

At the other end of the spectrum, the figure for Wales is just £534, 46% below the national average.

So why is this important? Well it matters because R&D funding is what drives wealth, well-paid jobs and industrial development.

This underlines the fallacy of devolving income tax, because Wales doesn’t have control over these things which could meaningfully increase that tax base through policy decisions.

If you look at the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and where it is allocating its money, it is pretty stark.

This department funds UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) which is the UK’s national funding agency which invests in science and research across the United Kingdom.

Wales receives less than half the per-person UKRI funding of the lowest English regions, and roughly one-quarter of London’s level

Wales must get its fair share of the money which actually creates prosperity.

The current system gives Wales better public services than it would be able to support economically because it is poor.

But it doesn’t stop Wales being poor and doesn’t give it the ability to make itself better. This is key.

When it comes to Wales, the current system is basically subsidising the status quo.

We don’t receive a population share of the spending areas which could actually make a difference.

A fair share of these areas must be guaranteed, not subject to the whims of ministers in London.

Poverty and young people

If you want to see the challenges Wales faces, go and stand on Fitzhamon Embankment in Cardiff city centre. It is on the west bank of the River Taff.

As you would expect for a street in the middle of a capital city, it is always busy.

It is right on the Taff Trail path, leading south to Cardiff Bay and going north, it would eventually take you all the way through the South Wales Valleys and the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park before finishing in Brecon.

There are commuters on their way to work, coming in on foot or exiting Cardiff Central station. At weekends, Riverside Farmers Market is held there.

What I have always found fascinating about this street is how different things are when you look east and west.

When you look east across the river, you are struck by the huge investment that has poured into Cardiff over the last 25 years.

The view is impressive. The Principality Stadium, an internationally-respected venue. The new HMRC tax office. The new BBC Wales building. Cardiff University’s School of Journalism. The new Cardiff bus station.

Once upon a time, you would have seen the iconic Brains Brewery, but now there is a lone chimney in the heart of a development of two high-rise buildings with more than 700 apartments.

There is an inescapable feeling of wealth and health. The data backs this up.

The smallest unit of geographic statistical measurement we have in Wales is called the Lower Super Output Area (LSOA).

As of the summer of 2025, there were 1,909 LSOAs in Wales and each one contained about 3,000 people or 1,200 households.

Of those areas, the part of the Welsh capital I have just described is top when it comes to employment and income. It is second in terms of health.

When you are looking at almost 2,000 areas, being top is quite impressive.

But if you turn your head 180° to look west, you can see the Riverside area of Cardiff.

This is the total opposite. It ranks 1,903 out of 1,909 for housing, 1,804 for employment, 1,804 for income and 1,852 for health.

If you are a bloke in Riverside, you have the lowest life expectancy of any ward in Cardiff.

Perhaps the most shocking statistic is that every time you see a child, the chances are they are growing up in poverty, because Riverside has a 55% child poverty rate.

These two places are right next to each other, separated only by a sewage-filled river (I also look at the environment in the book).

This should hammer home to you that mere proximity to wealth does not stop people being poor.

In 21st Century Britain, wealth does not trickle down. Like rain in the desert, it has evaporated long before it hits the floor.

One in five people in Wales live in poverty. That is 700,000 people in our country of just over 3m.

Of this total, there are 400,000 working-age adults, 200,000 children and 100,000 pensioners.

What blows my mind in Wales is that of all of the age groups, kids have consistently had the highest poverty rates, followed by working-age adults with children, while pensioners, along with working-age adults without children, have the lowest.

We currently have a situation in Wales where 40% of our children aged up to four years old live in poverty, yet successive Welsh Governments have relentlessly patted themselves on the back for the Well-being of Future Generations Act.

It’s like me asking you to praise me for creating a health and safety plan while my house is on fire.

The evidence that growing up in poverty negatively impacts children is overwhelming.

Children who grow up in poverty are more likely to face long-term disadvantages in education (early cognitive delays and lower qualifications), health (poorer physical and mental health into adulthood) and income (reduced lifetime earnings and higher financial insecurity).

This all contributes to every other issue in Welsh society.

You can’t fix schools, hospitals and productivity when 40% of your kids are spending their first years on this planet in poverty.

But you also can’t fix poverty when you have poorly performing schools, hospitals and lower productivity.

It’s an abominable chicken and egg situation (we talk about farming in the book too) which will take immense political courage and long-term vision to fix.

This brings me to my last point…

This only changes if we make it

When I say people don’t care, I am not just talking about politicians and government officials. I mean many of us, right here in Wales, don’t seem to really care we are being condemned to being perpetually poor and languishing in stagnation.

There is this acceptance that: “Of course Wales is poor. We always have been.”

Charities and non-governmental organisations are terrified to bite the hand which starves them.

Many labour under the illusion that because they have stuck the word ‘Cymru’ after their name, they are doing their bit.

However, I really believe this is on all of us in Wales. Change will only happen if we get angry and demand it. But anger needs to be directed in the right direction.

If you live in Cymru, you have every right to be furious with the current situation. But misplaced fury will do more harm than good. It is not the migrant in the boat who has caused Wales’ current plight, it is the politician in a suit.

Last weekend, I went to the amazing Wales v Italy Six Nations game. Before the match starts, Welsh men and women are visibly moved to tears as they belt out Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau inside the Millennium Stadium.

To be Welsh is in the very soul of these people here.

Go abroad and you will always know when you meet a Welsh person, because they will have told you within 45 seconds.

But fewer than half of the people in Wales even vote in our elections. If we want this thing called Wales to work, we need to do more.

The greatest block to making Wales prosperous isn’t our substandard politicians, it is the apathy of our people and how disengaged they are from the nation they love.

The thing I most took away from my years working as a journalist and writing this book was this: the only way Wales will improve is if the people of Wales make it happen. No-one is coming to help us. We have to help ourselves. Right now, we are collectively failing.

On May 20, 2025, I was watching First Minister’s Questions inside the Senedd.

It was being broadcast on the BBC website. At one point there were just 10 people watching it. 10.

In the last Senedd election in 2021, most people who were eligible to vote in Wales didn’t even bother. It was just a 46% turnout. In Scotland it was 17 percentage points higher.

We are totally disengaged from this country we proclaim to love.

Yes, Wales and the Welsh nation has been screwed over from pretty much the moment it was conceived, but right now, in 2026, we are as much to blame as anyone for our plight. Culpable through our own apathy.

Who cares about Wales? Just us. Luckily, that’s all Wales needs. But to make ‘caring’ mean anything, we need to truly understand what our problems are and then use our anger to force the changes that are needed.