Why Wales' trains aren't getting better and what went wrong with the 20mph limit...
Plus new exclusive polling for Wales
At a time when people crave escapism more than ever I am eternally grateful to you for choosing to have me drop into your inbox on a regular basis.
The uptake of this newsletter has blown me away. I never expected this level of subscribers early on so thanks very much - especially to those of you who have paid for a subscription. It really does help me write more of this kind of journalism.
This week, instead of a deep-dive into one topic, I am going to talk about a range of different issues that have come up over the last week. My inspiration for this move came from this Professor Brian Cox tweet:
So in the interest of us all becoming a group of polymaths who won’t stick a hairdryer up their nose to try and cure Covid, let's get into it. We are looking at three issues in this email:
Exclusive polling for Wales (revealed first in this newsletter);
An investigation I have been undertaking into how the UK Government is planning to shaft Wales over rail funding;
An explanation into exactly what went wrong for the Welsh Government with the 20mph limit introduction.
Polling
In the last newsletter we talked about how much pressure the Welsh NHS was under from both the UK Government, who are underfunding the Welsh budget, and the Welsh Government, who are allocating money to other departments and mismanaging it.
But what do the public want to be done to fix it and would they be willing to accept higher taxes to do so? To try and answer this a poll was conducted by the polling company Redfield and Wilton Strategies for WalesOnline. What they found was interesting…
I don’t want to subject you to “death-by-chart” so I have made them different colours to keep your polymath brain stimulated. There are five key graphs that I think we can draw conclusions from.
First up we have the quality of care that people in Wales feel they receive from the Welsh NHS. 75% of people in Cymru think that the quality of care in the Welsh NHS is moderate or better. As a journalist who covers health regularly and as someone who is perpetually using the health service either because of allergies or because I’m bad at sport, this rings true. When there is an acute or emergency situation the health service is great. The people are there because they care (why else would you put yourself in those conditions?) and they know their stuff. It is getting in front of the right person in a timely manner that is the problem.
Things get harder to interpret when we come to who provides the cash for the health service.
What the orange chart tells us is harder to interpret. One thing that is heartening is that only a quarter of people ticked “don’t know”. Now this may seem like a lot of people who don’t know a fairly fundamental element of how their country works, but I really expected this to be a lot higher.
It is hard to say what the” right answer” from the remaining three options was and this is probably because you can make an argument for all three. The Welsh Government does ultimately decide how much money is spent on health from the Welsh budget in Wales. They could decide to not fund it at all if they wanted. But the size of that Welsh budget (of which health is part) is overwhelmingly dictated by what the UK Government spends in England.
Of course, some of the people choosing “UK Parliament” are probably not following a nuanced thought process about budgets. More likely they simply have no idea what the Welsh Government actually does and assume when Chancellor Jeremy Hunt says “the NHS” he is talking about Wales.
So if the Welsh Government wants to increase funding for the Welsh NHS they have to cut something. This brings us onto our next chart…
If you want to increase NHS spending in Wales in any meaningful way you have to cut something else. There is no getting around that. Unlike the UK Government that can just borrow more, the Welsh Government can’t really do that (though it can a tiny bit for capital investment, like buildings).
A significant amount of people in Wales support cutting other areas but this is quite an easy statement when we speak in generalities. When we start asking what we should cut it gets harder. Not only because you have to decide what you cut (are we really taking money out of schools and housing?) but also because of how much you would have to do it to make any real difference in the health service.
Just over half of the Welsh budget is spent on health and social services and the majority of this goes directly to fund the NHS. To see a big percentage increase in NHS funding you would have to be pretty brutal with other budgets. Who would be a politician, right?
But there is another way: the Welsh Government could use its long neglected tax-raising power. Though the UK Government sets the rate of income tax, the Welsh Government has free range on setting rates over its devolved slice of income tax – so the Welsh tax on each income band could be eliminated entirely (i.e. cut by 10p) or raised without (theoretical) limit.
Surprisingly, there is some public support for this:
People are not however as keen to part with a lot of money as you can see from the green graph: