The Chancellor has pledged £445m for rail improvements in Wales over the next 10 years – but opposition parties have branded the investment an “insult” to the people of Wales.
While the government says the majority of that money will be spent in the next three years, the average investment of £45m per year has been dubbed “shameful” by the Senedd‘s largest opposition party.
In total, Wales is set to receive £5bn extra in revenue and capital funding over the next three years.
Among those pledges are £118m to secure the safety of South Wales’s coal tips and £80m for port infrastructure at Port Talbot, which last year saw the closure of the blast furnaces at the town’s steelworks.
The rail funding comes after a row about the re-classification of a rail line between Oxford and Cambridge to an England-and-Wales project.
That debate followed a similar one over high-speed rail project HS2, linking London and Birmingham.
Construction work on HS2. File pic: PA
HS2 was classed as an England-and-Wales project by the Conservative government.
If a project is classed as England-only, under an agreement called the Barnett Formula, Wales’s devolved government gets a population-based share of funding, alongside Scotland and Northern Ireland.
But England-and-Wales projects are considered to benefit both nations, so the Welsh government gets no extra cash from them.
Labour argues the cash boost is a result of the two governments, in Westminster and Cardiff, working together to deliver for Wales.
A Treasury source said Wales will “thrive” under the Labour Westminster government, and that the chancellor’s package “has the potential to be truly transformative”.
First Minister Eluned Morgan. File pic: PA
Wales’s first minister has described the spending review as a “big win” for Wales.
Speaking to Sky News, Eluned Morgan said the announcements in the review were “great news” for Wales and represented the “biggest uplift we’ve had for a long time”.
“[The UK government knows] that we’ve been under-funded for a long time and today they’ve started to correct that injustice,” she said.
“We know that the amount that’s been announced today is over and above what we would have had, had we had fairness when it comes to HS2.”
Read more on the spending review:
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But opposition parties say the funding isn’t enough, and claim that Wales is owed more.
Ben Lake, Plaid Cymru’s Treasury spokesperson, said the Chancellor’s statement was “more smoke and mirrors” and accused the government of “shifting the goalposts on Welsh funding”.
Welsh Conservative leader Darren Millar said the rail spending announcement was “an insult to the people of Wales”.
The Welsh Liberal Democrats’ Westminster spokesperson, David Chadwick, said the funding “falls far short of the billions owed to Wales over recent years” and called for the full devolution of rail to Wales.
A Reform UK spokesperson said the rail investment was “little more than a token” and did not “come close to addressing the decades of underinvestment our communities have endured”.
