On Tuesday, Elin Jones will take to her feet in the Senedd chamber to announce the Plaid Cymru government's first spending plans. For the last decade she has been the Presiding Officer of Wales' Parliament, or Llywydd, acting as the impartial chair of all Senedd proceedings. It will now be her turn again to face questions, as cabinet minister for finance.
Supplementary Budget Details
These spending plans are not a full budget. The last Welsh Labour government passed a budget for this financial year (April 2026-27) in the spring. But there was around £300m unallocated in that budget - £164m in revenue and £130m in capital. This week we will find out how the new Plaid government chooses to spend that money - and it will give us an indication of both the party's priorities and its challenges.
Plaid has already trailed spending on the NHS, childcare and free school meals. Over the last week press releases show £145m will be allocated to the NHS, £55m to childcare and £15m to free school meals. There will be other, less sizeable, announcements on Tuesday, we understand. That is the vast bulk of what is available already spent.
Labour Legacy and Access to Accounts
The last Welsh Labour government's support was passed earlier this year thanks to a deal between Labour and Plaid which saw the latter abstain. But Plaid maintains it did not have access to the full picture about government spending when it made that deal.
In First Minister's Questions last week, Rhun ap Iorwerth hit out at his critics over their claims that Plaid would have known the full difficult picture of the Welsh Government's accounts - and criticised the former Labour government over the mess he said it was leaving behind. He said: "To suggest that Plaid Cymru had access to the government books, as the former finance Minister put it, is demonstrably not true. That's not how access talks work. What I can confirm as true is that, in health, the previous Government left in-year pressures to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds. On top of that, they made multi-million pound unfunded commitments on childcare, for example, leaving a hugely challenging legacy behind. But I won't dwell on that fact. I won't use that as an excuse."
Plaid maintains the access it had to government accounts was no more detailed than any avid reader of spreadsheets on the Welsh Government website could access. They knew there would be unforeseen pressures from the NHS for example, but those within Plaid accuse Labour of making their job harder. They highlight a pledge made before the election to increase the base wage of nursery staff. In March 2026, it was announced that the hourly rate for the Childcare Offer would go up by 3.18% to £6.67. It was billed by the government as "one of the most generous comparable rates across the United Kingdom". The pledge was made, but £8m of money wasn't allocated, that is what he means when the First Minister speaks of "multi-million pound unfunded commitments on childcare".
Challenges and Future Questions
And that isn't the only money that needs to be found. There were questions all through the campaign about how Plaid would pay for the childcare promises it has made. Opposition parties say their requests for details have not been responded to.
The other questions that have been swirling around the halls of Cardiff Bay came as a result of comments by Elin Jones when she gave an interview last week about Tuesday's supplementary budget in which she said that "extremely difficult decisions" will need to be made. Some read into that the party has now seen that they don't have the money to fund ambitions, but the party say when she spoke of reprioritising, it was in terms of the shift from Labour to Plaid, not from its own priorities. Her party say that it was always expected that in budgets for the next financial years, they will not just follow Labour's lead. The hope, for example, is that their reforms will mean that less of their overall budget has to go to health, routinely the biggest single area to receive funding in the final budget.
The questions about funding will not, in the main, be answered on Tuesday, but there are hints. Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that the Plaid manifesto pledge to "create 10 new surgical hubs" was described as the following in a press release in the past few days: "The Welsh Government plans to develop up to ten surgical and diagnostic hubs over the next four years."
