Lee Waters

Published on LabourList on 17th September 2026 Andy Burnham’s early months as Prime Minister have revealed a tension that goes beyond the usual arguments about devolution. Beneath the rhetoric of economic renewal and "good growth in every postcode" lies a deeper contest about who holds power and where it should sit.  Recent interventions in the Welsh political debate expose the fault lines in our uneven  constitutional settlement, and highlight a political class struggling to decide whether it truly believes in devolution and is finally prepared to let go. The first fault line is familiar. For more than two decades, successive Welsh governments have sought incremental strengthening of the settlement. Yet a significant bloc of Welsh Labour MPs at Westminster has consistently resisted further transfers of power , arguing that devolved institutions should make better use of existing powers before acquiring new ones. The opposition has not been driven primarily by evidence or ad...

What does Andy Burnham’s pledge to deliver "deeper devolution" to trigger economic growth ‘in every postcode’ mean?   The Welsh Government are rightly defensive about guarding the boundaries of the hard-won devolved settlement. But Welsh Councils are chomping at the bit to get some of the devolution action in England where the new Prime Minister has promised to fundamentally rewire the state by ‘shifting power, funding and accountability from Whitehall to local leaders’.  The former Mayor of Manchester is now Prime Minister of the whole of the United Kingdom and needs to tread deftly (not least because of the political backdrop of nationalist leaders in each of the devolved governments).  The shape of Welsh local government and the way councils collaborate regionally are the responsibility of the Welsh and not the UK Parliament. Any hint that Westminster intends to bypass the Senedd in pursuit of its own regional agenda opens up a much broader constitutional conflict, n...

Sometimes it helps to look at things from the opposite point of view to your own: After a generation of devolved Government, with growing powers, Wales remains at the wrong end of every league table. Before asking for further powers, fulfill the potential of the ones you’ve got. That would get a round of applause at the weekly meeting of the Welsh Parliamentary Labour Party. The trouble is that it’s the same argument that a number of Welsh Labour of MPs have made at every turn of the devolution journey. I was a House of Commons Lobby Correspondent when the Richard Commission published the first call for a resolution to the ‘Jagged Edges’ of the devolution settlement and my notebook is full of such comments. Same again when Peter Hain and Rhodri Morgan cobbled together a clever but clunky compromise to fast-track law-making powers in the Government of Wales Act 2006. It was accepted under sufferance. To be fair they weren’t in power when the 2011 referendum on full law-making powers wa...