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:
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.
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 have published a long and detailed manifesto, as well as a plan for their first 100 days. They plan to:
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’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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
The Conservative manifesto is a little shorter on housing commitments than others, but they plan to:
Conservatives traditionally focus more on house-buying and the markets, but they have supported cross-party proposals in the Senedd related to homelessness.
The housing section in the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto is quite brief. They plan to:
The Liberal Democrat focus in Wales has been on health and social care in recent years, rather than housing.
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.
Read our manifesto to check out what The Wallich thinks the next Government should prioritise.