THE Welsh Government spent nearly £1 million last year on two homes in Gwent to make way for an M4 relief road, only for the First Minister to scrap the project just two months later.

And more than £9.7m was spent on buying land east of Newport during the period when the now-abandoned Black Route proposal was still on the table, according to Welsh Government figures obtained by the Welsh Conservatives.

Conservative MS Russell George, the shadow economy minister, criticised the Welsh Government's "shambolic decision-making process" regarding Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) for the relief road project.

CPOs give authorities such as governments and councils the power to buy a specified piece of land, even if the landowner is not minded to sell. The landowner is usually entitled to some form of compensation.

From the time the Welsh Government backed the Black Route option in July 2014, to the day Mark Drakeford cancelled the project in June 2019, it made CPOs for 14 properties - costing £9.7m.

A Welsh Government spokesperson said: “Acquiring properties prior to the CPO process is not unusual. Many of these are assets with value that will be disposed of when market conditions are right.

“Land and buildings purchased before devolution would have been under the authority of the Wales Office as part of the UK Government.”

The Black Route would have cut across largely rural land east of Newport and on Severnside, and the Welsh Government's CPOs made in the Black Route era were on land in Coedkernew and Rogiet.

They include two farms in Rogiet, bought for £2.3m and £1.7m in March and May 2018, respectively; and two homes in Coedkernew, for a combined £975,000, in April 2019.

Mr Drakeford, who had become First Minister the previous December, would go on to reject the Black Route proposals in June 2019, citing environmental concerns and spiralling costs.

“The financial waste built up by the Welsh Labour-run Government from the M4 relief road saga has been one of its most notorious scandals, and raises serious questions about how so much money can be wasted with nothing to show for it," said Mr George of the figures, which the Welsh Conservatives obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests.

Overall the figures show that a total of £15.2m was spent on CPOs for properties lying in the path of a proposed new motorway around Newport.

But some of the CPOs in those figures pre-date devolution in Wales and were made in the mid-1990s, when the Conservatives were in power in Westminster.

The data shows CPOs were made on 29 homes from 1995 to 2019, in a timeframe spanning two aborted attempts to build a relief road around Newport - the first lasting from 1991 to 2009; and the separate Black Route project, lasting from 2013 to 2019.

Of those 29 homes, 15 are currently vacant, seven are being rented out, and seven have been sold for a combined £2.1m.