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In his monthly blog for Caerphilly Observer, Plaid Cymru Senedd Member for South Wales East, Peredur Owen Griffiths, talks about the UK Government’s recent spending review

This week we saw one of the most blatant political sleights of hands. It came during the Labour Westminster Government’s spending review, which delivered £445m for new rail projects in the north and south of our country.

As the transport spokesperson for Plaid Cymru in the Senedd, I always welcome any investment that will improve public transport and connectivity but I have deep reservations over this announcement.

The Labour spin machine has been in overdrive since details of the announcement were first leaked by them late on Tuesday evening – this alone should have raised alarm bells.

Of course, this so-called investment comes on the back of the Oxford to Cambridge rail upgrade being reclassified by the Labour Westminster Government as an England and Wales infrastructure project.

Apart from being geographically inept given this project – just like the HS2 line between London and Birmingham – runs nowhere near Wales, this decision has effectively deprived Wales of an additional £330 million in consequential rail funding for its own network.

As further details of the spending review emerged during Wednesday, it was revealed that the £445m – that we were meant to be grateful for – was going to be spread out over a decade. This equates to less than £45m a year, making a mockery of the Labour spin machine’s claims that this was a good deal for Wales.

Furthermore, most of this cash has already been announced by Labour and is now just being repackaged as new investment.

Whilst we have a Welsh Government that is content to accept the scraps off Westminster’s table we will not be taken seriously as a country within the UK.

To some people, this may come across as a political argument over Excel spreadsheets but it has real and far-reaching consequences in the real world.

If you have ever bemoaned our creaking public transport, been hit by delays because our ailing transport stock has broken down, or been caught out by the fact that services do not run early or late enough for you to get to and from work or enjoy a night out, this continued short-changing of Wales should be of concern.

Whether Westminster is run by Tory or Labour Governments, Wales’ transport network has been underfunded and our taxpayers have ended up contributing to transport schemes in England. This has not been the case for Scotland or Northern Ireland, both of whom have enjoyed billions of pounds in funding consequentials whenever large transport schemes have been commissioned in England.    

The Labour Party once agreed with Plaid Cymru that we were owed billions in rail funding. This all changed as soon as they got an inkling that they were on course to win last year’s Westminster election.

People in Wales who backed Labour at last year’s general election because they wanted change and were sick and tired of our country being ripped off, must be feeling sorely disappointed.