Wales has so much untapped potential waiting to be unleashed

Their time in office can be summed up from a quote by Deputy Minister for Climate Change, Lee Waters MS, who in June 2019, when Deputy Minister for the Economy, said: “We don’t really know what we’re doing on the economy.”

Fundamentally, the Welsh Government has run out of ideas. It has had no new ideas on how to stimulate the economy to create jobs, having had an over reliance on attracting well-known businesses to Wales from the rest of the UK and abroad, and has failed to invest in new companies starting up in Wales, or support the ones we have.

When it comes to the Welsh NHS, Labour has underfunded the Welsh NHS by £400 million over the last decade, due to a mammoth budget cut of £800 million, in 2012, – the only government in Britain to have cut NHS spending in modern times.

Since 2010/2011, the UK Government has increased health spending in England by 29.2 per cent, but the Welsh Government has increased health spending by just 22.6 per cent, costing NHS Wales £401 million.

The 95 per cent target for patients spending less than four hours in A&E has never been met, with waits as long as 18 hours to be expected in our own health board, and the 95 per cent target of patients waiting fewer than 26 weeks in Wales hasn’t been met in 10 years.

Despite receiving more funding per person than in England, schools in Wales receive £100 less per pupil and the number of teachers in Wales has fallen drastically and has created a teacher recruitment crisis, particularly to teach in Welsh.

Add to this that Wales has the worst PISA results (a measure of success in education) in the United Kingdom, it paints a bleak picture for our children and for the future.

Quite simply, Labour is failing our NHS, economy, and education - instead focussing its efforts ploughing half a million pounds into developing school meals made out of bugs, yes bugs, or banning new road building, or introducing a highly inappropriate new sex education for children as young as four in school, without a parental opt-out.

We need a government focused on the people’s priorities, not one which can’t even tell us what a woman is.

The focus needs to be on protecting our children, creating jobs, attracting inward investment, fixing our NHS, helping people with the cost of living and attracting more teachers and NHS staff.

Wales has so much untapped potential waiting to be unleashed, it just needs the right conditions being created in Cardiff Bay, to truly allow it to flourish.

Wales deserves better.