Alexander Rooney: Labour run Wales is wasting money at home and abroad and to no good effect for anyone but politicians

Alexander Rooney is Chairman of the Clwyd East Conservative Association.

Wales is in crisis.

Council tax bills are soaring, roads are crumbling, bins go uncollected and waiting lists stretch from weeks to years. Families are left wondering: Where is all the money going?

The answer: Into the black hole of Labour mismanagement. A vortex of ideological pet projects, failed investments, and administrative blunders that do little for the people who pay the bills.

Let’s start with what should be unforgivable: money left on the table. In 2020–21 alone, the Welsh Government underspent its block grant by £155.5 million, sending desperately needed funds back to the Treasury. For a government that constantly claims to be starved of money, this was a damning confession: the issue is not funding, it’s competence.

While communities across Wales were battling post-pandemic realities, Labour ministers were signing off over £450,000 a year to plant trees in Uganda. Marketed as a climate initiative, this programme has instead seen local African farmers forced off their land, mirroring the same destructive ideology Labour is now exporting here at home. Farmers across Wales are being told to surrender 10 per cent of their productive land for tree planting and rewilding, a destructive policy trialled abroad with no democratic mandate, and now being enforced on our doorstep.

It’s ideological madness: exporting taxpayer money to displace farmers overseas and now replicating that damage in our own countryside all to chase arbitrary environmental targets.

Every year, nearly £4.7 million is poured into 20 Welsh Government “embassies” around the world, from Dubai to New York, duplicating the work of the UK Foreign Office. These “mini embassies” don’t build trade or attract investment at a scale that justifies their cost. What they do is offer ministers photo ops and talking points.

Some failures are well known: the Life Sciences Fund lost 56 per cent of public investment. The Technium incubators were a £100 million joke. The £131 million LG Electronics gamble collapsed. Even the now-defunct “Cooking Bus” (£5 million) and the infamous Kung Fu lodge (£1.6 million) were touted as innovation, until they weren’t.

But this is not about nostalgia. These failures matter because they haven’t stopped. Labour in Wales keeps repeating the same mistakes: throwing money at untested schemes, propping up vanity assets, and refusing to listen to the public, or their own failures.

It’s important to recognise that significant sums are being spent on the NHS and social care. Yet the outcomes remain worse than England’s across almost every metric. Over 20,000 people in Wales are waiting more than two years for treatment, compared to just a few hundred in England. The problem isn’t money it’s how and where it’s being spent. Procurement inefficiencies, bloated management structures, and dogmatic centralisation drain budgets before they ever reach the front line.

While families across Wales tighten their belts and hospitals struggle to stay open, Labour and Plaid Cymru have joined forces to spend £120 million expanding the Senedd with 36 extra Members, another bloated vanity project that no ordinary voter asked for, no one voted for, and almost no one wants. It’s a classic case of political self-interest dressed up as reform.

The Welsh Conservatives are the only party standing against this.

As Darren Millar MS rightly put it: “We need more nurses and doctors, not more politicians.”  He’s right, this isn’t about democracy; it’s about jobs for the boys in Cardiff Bay.

The current Senedd only sits two days a week. Westminster manages four. If the goal is more scrutiny, the obvious solution is to sit more often, not hire more politicians to squeeze through the same two-day funnel. But logic rarely survives in Labour-led Wales, where former First Minister Mark Drakeford, the architect of this expansion, once claimed that Wales has “too many hospitals.” He’s now decided we need more politicians instead.

Wales deserves better. It deserves leaders who respect the public purse, who prioritise outcomes over ideology, and who know the difference between government and grandstanding.

Keir Starmer says Wales is the model for Britain. After 26 years of Labour rule, we know exactly what that means: fewer services, higher taxes, and a government more interested in symbolism than substance.

We can fix this. But only if we stop pretending that waste is accidental. It’s a political choice — and it’s time we made a different one.