Senedd election 2026: summary of the main parties’ manifesto promises

On Thursday 7 May voters across Wales will have the opportunity to elect 96 new Members of the Senedd (Welsh Parliament). This will help decide which party (or parties) form the next Welsh Government, who will have the power to set housing and homelessness policies and strategies for the next four years.

So:

• How do the elections work?
• What are the main political parties saying about housing and homelessness?

How the elections work

The way we vote in Wales is changing since the last time we voted in 2021.

Wales has been divided up into 16 constituencies, and each constituency will elect 6 members. Parties have put forward a list of six candidates in each area, and voters can vote for one party list.

The six seats in each constituency will be shared out roughly in proportion to the number of votes each party gets. So if a party gets half of all the votes, they will get half the seats (3 out of 6). If they get a sixth of the votes, they will get just one seat. If they get less than about 12 per cent of the total votes, they probably won’t get any seats.

The seats will be awarded to the party list candidates in order, so those at the top of the lists will get first dibs.

You can put your postcode into this find your constituency tool  or use the Who Can I Vote For? website  to find the candidates who are standing in your area.

What are the political parties saying?

Each of the political parties has published a manifesto setting out their plans if they become the next Welsh Government. Some of these are very long and contain lots of detail, others are significantly shorter. They are worth looking at if you want to see what the parties have to say (or not say) about a specific issue, but they can seem overwhelming as full documents. A manifesto only ever really shows a party’s broad intentions, as things can and do change a lot after the votes are all counted.

If you don’t have time to read all the manifestos, I have pulled out some of the key commitments around housing and homelessness.

Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru have published a long and detailed manifesto, as well as a plan for their first 100 days. They plan to:

• Legislate to embed a right to adequate housing in Welsh law.
• Build at least 20,000 new social homes by 2030.
• Introduce measures to protect renters, including ending no-fault evictions, limiting annual rent increases, and giving the legal right to have a pet.
• Carry out a regular Welsh Housing Survey to improve data about the sector.
• Embed a Housing First, trauma-informed and person-centred approach to homelessness, making sure new homelessness legislation is implemented effectively and kept under review.
• Deliver housing adaptations and improvements so older people can live safely and independently in accessible homes.
• Provide warmer, more energy efficient homes, through targeted programmes for insulation and green energy retrofitting.
• Establish Unnos, a new national development agency to speed up social housebuilding.

There is a lot of detail in the 74-page Plaid Cymru manifesto, on housing as well as every other policy area. But there are real questions about whether Plaid would be able to follow through on all its commitments in just four years, and within the tight budget framework of Welsh Government. We need to make sure that housing and homelessness do not lose out to other priority areas.

Reform UK

Reform’s manifesto is a much shorter 19 pages, but there is still some indication of where their priorities lie for housing policy. They plan to:

• Speed up planning to build at least 10,000 additional new homes, although they do not specify that these should be social homes, or even affordable.
• Prioritise veterans for social housing and enforce 10-year residency requirements before people can be considered eligible for social housing, apart from domestic abuse survivors and care leavers under 25.
• End the Help to Buy scheme for first time house buyers.
• Cancel sustainability requirements for housebuilders.
• Require every town to create a strategic plan for housing, shops, and public services.
• Strengthen powers to restrict Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMOs), with a particular focus on stopping landlords “knowingly housing illegal immigrants”.
• Expand early intervention and preventative working in mental health services.

There is also a lot in the manifesto on topics such as immigration which are not devolved to Wales, and which the Senedd cannot make decisions on.

Welsh Labour

Labour’s manifesto lists things they have done in government, followed by what they want to do next if re-elected. They say they will:

• Commit to ending homelessness by 2034 and aim to have no children placed in B&B temporary accommodation by 2030.
• Build 100,000 new homes over the next ten years, including at least 40,000 new low carbon homes for rent in the social sector. All new homes will include renewable energy sources such as solar panels by default.
• Strike a “fairer deal for private renters” including a guarantor scheme to help people secure a property.
• Introduce new rights for tenants and people in hostels and refuges to keep pets.
• Introduce a vacant land tax to prevent land-banking and encourage development.

Labour is running on their record in government, unlike the other parties in this election. They recently introduced the Homelessness and Social Housing Allocation (Wales) Act which got cross-party support. Having been in government since the beginning of devolution, there are inevitable questions as to why these manifesto promises haven’t been achieved before.

Green Party

Housing features very prominently in the Green manifesto, as the second of their ‘key priorities’, ahead of health, transport and the environment. Their plans include:

• Freeze rents immediately in the private sector, then develop a system of rent controls and regulations. They also want to end no-fault evictions, and outlaw rental bidding wars.
• Build 60,000 new social homes over 10 years.
• Create a new independent housing ombudsman to resolve disputes and challenge unfair charges.
• Embed the Right to Adequate Housing in Welsh law, invest in early homelessness prevention, and improve coordination between housing, health and social services.
• Expand the Social Housing Grant, and use compulsory purchase powers to bring empty homes back into public housing stock.

In many ways the Green’s housing proposals are the most radical of all the parties, but they have limited experience in actually delivering policy in Wales at a local or national level.

Welsh Conservatives

The Conservative manifesto is a little shorter on housing commitments than others, but they plan to:

• Work with stakeholders to develop a plan to eradicate rough sleeping in Wales.
• End the use of hotels and caravans as emergency accommodation for families with children.
• Publish new guidance to address delays in cross-border local connection disputes.
• Build 40,000 new homes by 2030 (not specified as affordable or social homes).
• Restore the Right To Buy policy in Wales, reinvesting sale proceeds into more affordable homes.
• Review the operation of Rent Smart Wales.

Conservatives traditionally focus more on house-buying and the markets, but they have supported cross-party proposals in the Senedd related to homelessness.

Welsh Liberal Democrats

The housing section in the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto is quite brief. They plan to:

• Build 30,000 new social homes, prioritising building on brownfield land.
• Publish a cross-government plan to end rough sleeping and all forms of homelessness, focussing on prevention and advice services, as well as multi-year funding for Housing First.
• Make homes warmer and cheaper to heat with an emergency upgrade programme.

The Liberal Democrat focus in Wales has been on health and social care in recent years, rather than housing.

Is any of this deliverable?

The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has examined all the major party manifestos, and has judged all of them to be lacking sufficient detail about how they plan to pay for their proposals. The Welsh Government is pretty constrained financially. It receives most of its funding from the UK Government in Westminster through the ‘Barnett Formula’. (Which means when the UK Government spends money in England only, it allocates a share to the Welsh Government to spend how it sees fit.)

The Welsh Government has only very limited powers to raise taxes or borrow money, meaning an increase in spending in one area usually means cuts elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, the parties have not talked much about areas of spending they want to cut to balance the budget. This will all be up for grabs in negotiations after the election.

At The Wallich, we believe everyone deserves a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. Voting ensures issues like housing, support services, and community wellbeing are represented.

Read our manifesto to check out what The Wallich thinks the next Government should prioritise.