Lee Waters

Akash Paun (AP): You were first appointed as deputy minister for economy and transport in 2018. What was that process like? What was the conversation that you had with the first minister at the time? 

Lee Waters (LW): Well, I was not expecting to be appointed to minister, really, because I'd come into politics not playing the usual game because I'd been elected in a very marginal seat and I come from a background of running a small think tank and being a journalist. So I wasn't coming into this to say the things people usually say and do the things people usually do and keep my head down. I was expecting a short-lived opportunity and wanted to try and be more interesting than that. So I didn't go about my time on the backbenches in a way likely to win me friends and influence. For example, one of the first things I did was to take on our first minister of time, Carwyn Jones, on the M4 [the proposed M4 extension around Newport], which was a party manifesto commitment and something he personally felt strongly about. This was not a conventional approach to winning favour. 

So when Mark Drakeford was elected, I played a role in his campaign advising on comms and to be honest I wasn't expecting him to offer me a position. He took me aside the day before the reshuffle to say, “I’m thinking of offering you a position. I just want to check that's something you'll be comfortable with and whether or not you'll be willing to compromise” - because you know government is all about compromise. Which I was slightly taken aback by the question because, though I'm driven to try to achieve things, I'm also a pragmatist and a team player. Of course I'm going to compromise. So on the day itself, I was expecting to be called in, but I had no idea what I was going to be offered. 

I'd just done a piece of work as a backbencher for ministers on digital and public services, which is an interest I developed as I was particularly frustrated by how poor public services were aligned to user needs. And so having done a very rapid piece of work with an expert group on that, I thought I might be offered a digital role - which I would be very much up for. Then he really surprised me in offering me economy and transport because I've been a big critic of the government on the economy and on transport, and in fact of the minister he was asking me to work with, Ken Skates. So I was really not expecting it. I was quite taken aback really and it took me some time to process. 

He also asked me - would I take on a role on strategic communication? Which is traditionally a first minister function, but because I had done it on the campaign, he said - look you're better at this than I am, would you be willing? And I wasn't keen to be honest but I said ‘can I think about that aspect of it?’. 

The transport thing was particularly delicate because obviously he was going to have to make a decision on whether to go ahead with the M4. That was a quasi-judicial decision. He had made clear, both to me and to the public, that I would have no role in that decision because obviously I had very clear views on what I thought should happen and he had to come to it afresh in the decision making role. But I suppose in appointing me he was also sending a signal of where his instincts were, both to his supporters and to the outside world. He didn't say this to me in explicit terms, but it was part of a sort of softening up exercise to send the signal of where the direction of thinking was going - which was important. 

So, there was a lot to process, I suppose, in that initial period. But I was obviously delighted to get a chance to try and get my hands on the machinery of government. 

AP: And what did the first minister say to you about what he wanted you to focus on? 

LW: He didn't really. He’d given me a list of the responsibilities and he said - “I'd like you and Ken Skates (who was the minister) to work out between you how best to do it and I'll only get involved if you can't agree” essentially. So I sat down with Ken and tried to work that through. Which was difficult because to be fair to him, I had been a massive pain in the arse for him as a backbencher, criticising particularly the transport policy direction, but also our general, very orthodox approach to economic policy we've had as a Welsh government - very inward investment focused, very large anchor company focused. I think pretty ineffective really. So I was, you know, in the mood to be sort of disruptive and Ken was very orthodox in his approach. We had to try and make that work. There is no personal animus between us, but obviously I'd been challenging. In the end we did that fine and we got on well. 

There were a couple of bumps at the beginning, not least when I gave a speech saying that we didn't know what we're doing on the economy. Which caused some consternation. For me, culturally it was a bit of a clash. Because I suppose I've given this as an off the cuff speech on the economic policy and making the point about the need to move to a more experimental approach rather than pretending we have a very clear idea of how to control the economy. Because A) the Welsh government has very few economic powers and B) we are living in enormous external disruption with Brexit and with AI, and we needed to have a more nimble approach to trying to iterate different approaches to economic policy. This was what I said in the speech. But in a very flippant, offhand way that you can get away with when you're running a think tank. Which is slightly different when you’re a government minister. I used this phrase that “No government knows what they're doing on the economy. We don't know what we’re doing on the economy, we're making it as we go along. Every government does - let's stop pretending otherwise and just be open to experimenting a bit more.”

AP: And that phrase made headlines?

LW: Yes, not surprisingly. It was a pretty rudimentary error really and has certainly been weaponised politically against me and is used against me to this day. So that was a useful learning experience – you're never too old to learn. 

AP: Were you able to make significant changes in the way that you just described? 

LW: Not on the economy, no. The Welsh government finds it easier to write strategies than to actually do stuff, because we're very small and civil servants generally find it easier to write papers than they do to change delivery, partly because the delivery mechanisms are so diffuse. And it's hard. So we certainly succeeded in sending signals and the economic strategy that Ken and I launched certainly reflected the need for an emphasis on the foundational economy - the economy of the everyday. And we set up a £4.5m challenge fund where we funded several dozen different small projects to try different approaches with the intent to scale the ones that worked. Accepting that many would fail and it was OK because we don't really know what we're doing in the economy. So let's at least see that as a positive. So there was, I would say, some limited success on that. But it was never really embraced by the government as a whole. Mark Drakeford himself didn't really put his weight behind it. Ken Skates allowed me to get on with it but didn't share my view on it really. Then COVID came along and just knocked the whole thing sideways.

Some of it still lives on to this day - within the Welsh government’s structures and policies there is reference to it. I think it's been taken in a very different direction than the one that I would have, but you can't win them all. I was trying to make lots of quite significant changes at the same time, and on reflection, you have to recognise which ones are gaining some traction and which ones are not going to be possible. I remember Denis Healy [chancellor of the exchequer, 1974–79] saying that, “a social democrat is somebody who plants seeds in fertile soil”. The soil for the foundational economy in Wales, given the power I had within the Welsh government, was not fertile. I had more fertile areas that I could pursue in digital reform and transport reform.

So I made a start and set some things in motion, but the sort of changes in experimentation that I'd have liked to have seen I was not in a position to pursue. 

AP: You came into the job with a background in the policy world, having worked in a think tank [as director of the Institute for Welsh Affairs]. To what end did that prepare you well for the job? 

LW: Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I think the big learning experience was just understanding how the machinery of government interplays with each other. How ministers get the civil service to move. And then how you use your power to bring about change? Because it's an incredibly complex environment where the power sources are often hidden and people aren't transparent with you about whether or not they agree with you, or whether they're likely to be able to support you. So you are operating in the dark a little, and trying to work that out I found intellectually fascinating. That's the bit I really learned from the experience of being a minister because I had encountered the civil service from a very bottom up level when I ran the Welsh arm of the NGO Sustrans. 

So I've succeeded as a campaigner, in getting the Active Travel Act passed, which is the world's first piece of legislation to treat cycling and walking on equal footing with transport. I'd been able to infiltrate the machine from the bottom, if you like, but trying to navigate it from a different level was unknown territory for me. 

The political dynamic was complex as I was in a relationship with the minister [Ken Skates] and we had differences of view, though as I say, not personal we just saw the world in a different way. So I had to navigate that. There was a relationship with Mark Drakeford and how he managed the fact that he deliberately put two ministers together with very different views and how that relationship could be navigated. Obviously I didn't want to be trying to go over Ken's head to him [Drakeford] when we couldn't resolve a dispute - that was not going to be a very successful recipe and I couldn't do it very often. I think I did it once or twice primarily on the 20mph policy and on some digital stuff, but that's something to be used sparingly. 

There’s the relationship with other cabinet ministers and then with the civil service itself. The civil service are at one level disingenuous because they like to say “yes” to you and they don't always mean “yes”. So it's learning to understand when they really mean “yes” and when they don't, what levers can you pull. 

AP: In terms of that relationship with Ken Skates - technically, on paper at least, you were the deputy minister and he was the senior minister. How did that work in practical terms? 

LW: It's a very funny thing in the Welsh government, this deputy minister / minister role because prior to Mark Drakeford becoming first minister the deputy ministers were essentially full ministers but in very narrow fields. So they would be given particular responsibilities and they essentially governed that area. The minister had the budget signed off, so depending on the personalities and how people got on, you sometimes would have tussles there. For example, famously Edwina Hart and Alun Davies, when she was economy minister and he was a deputy, did not get on well and she was not sharing information. In order to find out his department's own budget, he had to go to the Senedd’s research service!

Our relationship wasn't like that at all. In theory the minister has signoff and could block things, but in practice that never happened. I saw us as far more on an equal footing. But obviously he was the minister and I was the deputy, so there was obviously a limit to that. But it was something to be negotiated rather than something written on a tablet of stone.

AP: So you didn’t have a defined brief?

LW: To start off I think we were keen to give me defined responsibilities and try to keep me away from the main transport brief because obviously I had some disruptive thoughts, plus we had the M4 decision which had to be handled very carefully. So I looked after active travel and road safety - which meant the 20mph policy, pavement parking and active travel policy more generally. 
I also then had digital infrastructure and I had what was called the ‘Valleys Task Force’, which was a poorly thought out manifesto commitment to do something on economic development in the Valleys - but nobody really had quite worked out what that something was. So I had to try and make something of that. 

It started off very much in those terms, but as it went on the brief became more fluid, particularly when COVID hit and I took on a wider range. Obviously I had the strategic communications role as well, which also allowed me to put my nose into a whole bunch of things.

Also the Valleys task force, in practice, had responsibility across all policy areas in the Valleys. Maybe not responsibility but an input and a budget to spend. So I was able to roam very widely across housing, transport, digital innovation, under that cover.

AP: So that was a cross cutting brief and budget? Thats an interesting model.

LW: Yes, it was beyond the department. I think we got to this quite interesting place because it wasn't defined. It was a political commitment to do something for the Valleys which are the poorest part of Europe. My predecessor Alun Davies, who took that forward, did a lot of the initial work of trying to do public meetings and so had defined what the demand was but I inherited a pretty blank canvas. Nothing much had been decided. There was a budget, so the approach I decided to take was to look to spread good practice from existing programmes. One area that had made ground within one council, was a policy on empty homes - where [Rhondda Cynon Taff council] had identified a problem with empty properties and had produced a small grants scheme to get people to renovate them, under the condition they stayed in them for five years afterwards. I thought that was a great scheme and so we put quite a lot of the money into scaling that across the Valleys, with the requirement for local authorities to put some much funding in to try and make it self-sustaining, and also a commitment to use the council tax to levy extra council tax on people who kept homes empty. So that had legs and then became mainstream government policy for the whole of Wales. And that started by taking a local authority’s good practice and scaling it across the Valleys through this fund and then scaling it across Wales. 

AP: And what did the strategic communications role amount to? 

LW: It's formally one of the responsibilities of the first minister to have an overview of the Welsh government strategic communications capability. But in practice it wasn’t really exercised very much, so either the director of communications in the civil service did that or a media special advisor would do it.

But I had played a role in [Drakeford’s] campaign, I'd done a similar role in the 2011 devolution referendum campaign and I'd been a journalist too. So what I tried to do was examine where the weak spots were of the government’s messaging and structures. 

The Welsh government had a very old fashioned approach to comms – very press release heavy. Not very creative. No really thematic vision or story to tell of what we were trying to achieve across the government. Ministers themselves were very patchy in their interests, so a culture had developed where it was OK for ministers not to do interviews - which I thought was appalling. So we did some media training. We set a clear tone that was expected of ministers. We changed the social media approach, for example. Far too much attention was given by the civil service to doing tweets for individual ministers, which took an enormous amount of time and which nobody was looking at. 

We experimented with doing live press conferences, for example, which then during COVID was part of why we could respond so well. We’d made changes upskilling the press office into dealing with video content creation and also into getting the culture changed so ministers were far more out front and centre. 

I also had a sort of a week-to-week role with the first minister in preparing for first minister’s questions. So I was part of the briefing session for that and really it was just a roving brief to put my nose into things where I thought there might be a problem from a political messaging point of view. So that was interesting and I enjoyed that because again, you know, it got me sort of out of Ken [Skates]’s hair a bit.

AP: Did you end up annoying other cabinet ministers instead? 

LW: Yeah, well constructively, I hope. I think it helped having a fellow politician to say “look, we've got a problem here”, because I don't think the civil service or the spads really felt empowered to be able to do that. But as I say, after a year COVID struck so that that changed enormously and the role really didn't develop much beyond that because we entered into a different phase. 

Millie Mitchell (MM): Turning onto COVID, can you tell us what it was like to be a minister in that initial moment of crisis and how the operation of Welsh government was able to adapt? 

LW: Do you know what? I've tried to blank it out to be honest. I find thinking about it quite traumatic and I'm very glad that I haven't yet been pulled into the COVID inquiry because I think colleagues who have had to revisit their emails and decisions in those times - I find that quite triggering because it was really all hands on deck and everybody just go on with it. And did that remarkably. But in particular, as you look back in hindsight, it was really was a very difficult time. We were flying blind, clearly, and everybody did their very best and worked very hard - the civil servants and politicians. I think it was the best of public service, really. 

You were working constantly and we were new to remote working. We had Teams on our machines, but I've never used it and didn’t know what it was. We were working, as lots of people were, from half-seven/eight in the morning until eight/nine at night with literally back-to-back meetings. Which was exhausting. And you're conscious that you are making decisions too quickly and with imperfect information, but you have to make decisions nonetheless, and that was discomforting. 

Mark Drakeford was a very collegiate first minister, to a point. So the whole distinction between minister and deputy minister went out of the window at that point and we all attended all meetings. Before then deputy ministers didn't attend cabinet. So that changed. We'd have daily meetings and all the information was circulated and everybody's voice was heard. Mark was very good at that. He was a big fan of giving everybody a chance to make a contribution. But it was a contribution in order to catch up with where he got to. So you know, he's an incredibly intelligent guy who is very experienced in government, having been chief special advisor for well over a decade and also a university professor. So his appetite for absorbing complex information and making decisions was phenomenal. I've worked with a number of politicians and seen a number of them up close and he is, calibre-wise, he's the top of the tree. But because he was so intellectually self-confident, and because he did have access to all the information himself, I did feel like a lot of time we were being given information to understand a decision he had reached. We got the chance to test it and to challenge it, but the decisions rarely changed. They would when he didn't have a firm view on something and as the crisis went on, as decisions were being made quicker, that sometimes happened. 

For example, the famous Christmas [2021] lockdown: I can remember we met on a Saturday afternoon, we had just finished for Christmas and then several hours later we were summoned to this emergency afternoon meeting. [Drakeford’s] preference at that time was to begin the lockdown on the Tuesday, from memory, and he was quite settled on that view. But through discussion we all made the case and I remember specifically saying “we've had the dance, now it's time for the hammer.” And so we decided to bring it in that afternoon, which is not something that [Drakeford] had gone into that meeting intending to do. So there were a small number of times where it ended up in a different place than he came into the meeting thinking it would, but not very often. 

I particularly played a role of a sort of critical friend in being willing to say things others often didn't to test arguments and I was sometimes a bit uncomfortable. But to be fair to Mark, he very much was supportive of that role. So I think that was quite a useful process. It wasn't a sort of government of – “here's my decision, take me on”. It was – “here's where I'm minded to go, ask any questions, let's test the arguments”. Which I think was a good process. I suppose as I'm reflecting more and more, the idea that this was some kind of cabinet of equals is not quite the case. And nor should it be - I'm not suggesting it should. But I think it's just a useful corrective to some of the narrative that was forming at the time.

MM: During the pandemic, did you have much experience of working with ministers in the UK and other devolved governments? 

LW: I didn't have any involvement until then. That was strange because we then had these frequent interministerial group meetings, and we were there with essentially the whole of the UK cabinet apart from the prime minister. And then you have ministers from the devolved ‘administrations’ - as they insisted on calling us. Which I thought was quite, you know, a power play of the language. And that was really weird, because they [the ministers] weren't very good. We all have this idea that Westminster government is - and they propagate this - of a higher calibre and that this is where the talent goes to. It's really not true! And that was quite an experience for me because I was dealing with these ministers who frankly some of them were very poor, and even the ones who were senior, high-profile ministers were not impressive. And I think in terms of our [Welsh government] cabinet, we punched above our weight in terms of calibre, really. 

AP: Anyone in particular? 

LW: I don't wish to be unkind, but it was like they were at a press conference – the way they were speaking to each other and the way they were making the case. They were just going through the motions. Like, I remember, Gavin Williamson [then secretary of state for education 2019–21] would sit in a particular way like he was doing a Newsnight interview. I think Therese Coffey [then secretary of state for work and pensions 2019–2022] once appeared from her bed in her pyjamas. Some had blazing flags behind them. It was all really weird. It was just weird compared to the way we’d been doing things. You know, we're a small group, informal but very professional and serious in what we were doing. This didn't seem professional or serious. It felt like a game was being played and people were just repeating their lines to take and there's no real rigour or challenge. Michael Gove [then minister for the Cabinet Office 2020–21 and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 2019–21] was impressive. I thought he was the only real grown-up that I came across and I thought - OK, you're taking this seriously and you're a serious minister. Others were far more political and shallow, I thought. I’m not trying to make a party point here, I was just a bit shocked, really, at the level of ability that we were dealing with. I expected better. 

MM: And what were the implications of that for the outcome of those meetings? 

LW: They weren't terribly meaningful exchanges, really. Useful in the sense that we had a forum to get our point across. Whereas in the normal course of business, that point would have been marginalised as a note to a private office and it would just get filed. Whereas we had the floor in a sense. So obviously you have to pick your battles, but there were times when we had a point that was serious to us and depending on which minister we had, I could be forceful when I needed to be, polite but clear in my view. We were able to get serious engagement. 

One of the examples I was involved in was funding for Celsa Steel in Cardiff. I dealt with Nadhim Zahawi [then parliamentary under-secretary of state for business and industry 2019–21] quite a bit and he was he was a courteous professional minister. Quite a lot of them just reading lines, which to be fair some of our ministers do that too, but I found that really odd at that level. But because you had the floor and because they knew you'd have the floor again at the next meeting, you couldn't be dismissed or your issues couldn't be dismissed in the same way as the normal order of business in Whitehall sometimes tends to be. 

So they were very useful in that sense and also in demystifying the whole ‘Wizard of Oz’ scenario of government. You think it's a big all powerful image but it is actually just a grubby little man behind a curtain turning a wheel. It also explained quite a lot about the chaos we were dealing with from the UK government because we were getting reports out of COBRA and from our scientific advisors on, you know, just very nakedly political decisions being made not on the basis of the science, but on the basis of the ideological predilections of whoever was in a powerful position at that time. Whereas we very much tried to take a sober approach where we examined the science. We took the SAGE advice very seriously and rarely departed from it, really. And so the chaos of the process that we were seeing made a lot more sense when the curtain was pulled back and we saw what really was going on in the government between the ministers. 

MM: So moving on from COVID for now… 

LW: Just before we move on, one aspect of COVID which was interesting is that, as I mentioned, before coming into government I did a piece of work on digital, where I brought together an expert group and came up with some recommendations. Well, I kind of drew on that during COVID on the issue of PPE. I was tasked with being the point person for trying to sort out PPE supplies because obviously like the rest of the UK, we had some real problems and in the early days of COVID we were having to draw on England’s supplies to stop us from running out. So I did a twice daily meeting with the key officials from the health service, the economy department and local government to try and make sure that that the chains of communication were open. This meant if we knew they were having a problem with care homes or in part of the NHS, we all knew about it and action was being pursued. And that worked very successfully. We were lucky - not lucky, it was by design…We did not pursue the dismembering of the NHS through competition in the way was done in England. So we had shared structures, infrastructure and expertise. 

We had something in the NHS called the ‘shared services division’ who were responsible for procurement and they had relationships, they had systems and they had suppliers. So when we were trying to source additional PPE, we had a way of doing it. We didn’t have the fraud that happened in England because we had a system and we didn't have VIP lane. We similarly had people with connections saying “We know somebody in China, we can get you masks”. You know, we all had that. But we then said “That's very interesting, thanks very much. We'll run it through our system.” We asked, “Are there company accounts? Are these fit and proper people?” There's a due diligence process and that saved us from the worst excesses of the fraud in England. So A) we had the infrastructure and the skilled professionals, but also them B) because government was small and closer in Wales, and local government was very much seen as a partner - we didn't use outsourcing in the way it was in England, instead we got local government to do test and trace and the PPE relationships. So we were able to have that regular drum beat. If they were having a problem within local government, then they were there with me in that meeting every day and we knew we were meeting again in eight hours when we know we needed an answer. 

We kept up that drum beat of twice daily meetings for several months, until we had sufficient stocks that we no longer felt in crisis. But that was a very intense and very productive process, which I think can be learned from for a government in a crisis. But even when not in a crisis, breaking down those barriers and getting everybody around the table and having ministerial accountability. I didn't do anything other than make sure that the people whose job it was to do something were accountable and would explain why things weren't happening. That speeded things up and it was done in a very collaborative and collegiate way. We all got along incredibly well, but we were able to get the system moving. 

So I really liked that model and so when I got my new role [as deputy minister for climate change 2021–24] and I was tasked with – “How do we meet our climate change targets?”, I was attracted to that model and developed it through what we called our deep dive process, and the first one we did was trying to understand why we were so off pace with our tree planting targets. And I did another one on barriers to renewable energy deployment and another one on town centre policy. 

MM: I'll jump straight to a question we've got lined up about those - can you tell us a bit more about how these deep dives worked in practice?

LW: So they changed a little as each one iterated, but the first one I was very keen. So when Mark Drakeford appointed Julie James and I to be a ‘super ministry’ with the PR line that “tackling climate change will be the central organising principle of the government” - it never was, but that was the that was the advertised line - I was quite determined that Julie and I, who had got on well as we both had a reputation for getting things done, hit the ground running. And the one thing I was very aware of was how poor we've been at meeting our tree planting targets. We were way off, so I didn't understand why and I wanted to understand why. So we almost immediately announced that I would do this. This would have been in late May and we announced that we would report back before the summer recess which was in early to mid-July. 

The process was to bring together the key officials who are responsible for delivery, the key external bodies who are then also working with them, some independent academics, and some deliberate awkward sods. That mix was important. So that group met three times for an hour and a half, from 8:00 till 9:30, on the Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning for a very intense period and the process I adopted as this as chair was: “Our task here is to get a common sense of what the problem is. So what are the barriers? Let's get agreement.” If I'm getting agreement on that, which is harder than it sounds, then, “What practical things can we all agree will actually improve that?” And then once that's agreed, the government will commit to it. That's the key thing of having a minister chairing it is, it’s not just “here's a nice report of what government should do” it was “this is what we are going to do.”

And that was very stimulating, very productive. It put a lot of strain on a very small civil service team who did very well to keep up. But we came up with a short report, because again I was not interested in writing reports, I wanted a list of actions with an evidence base for it. The focus was on what was going to happen and by when.

We published as we promised by the summer recess the tree deep dive which was largely implemented. Some of it more than others hasn't been fully implemented and austerity has been a key part of that. But it shifted the needle.
We then did the town centre one, if I remember correctly. That was an interesting one as well. One thing about the climate ministry was that it cut across policy divisions. Ultimately, I don't think it was a success because the only thing that that held that the ministry together was the two ministers. We were the only bits that cut across the policy areas - the civil service didn't really join up. But this exercise was useful because I was able to get transport officials, planning officials, regeneration officials and economy officials all together in one group accountable to me. Alongside local government and the key people, the key blockers in some cases. Again it was that process of: “What's the problem? What practical things can we do now on town centres?” We're talking about sort of deeply entrenched economic forces here. It's not as simple as let's have a grant scheme… well we could have done that, but it wouldn't been effective.

I was trying to understand really what was driving this and so that was really hard and there's some really good people. What was interesting with experts and academics as they're very good on the problem analysis, very poor on the practical policy suggestions which would shift the needle. So forcing them and not letting them out of the room until we had agreement of, “OK, this we think will make a difference. None of these are game changers, these are all steps along the way that will move the trajectory,” which is I think part of understanding my journey of understanding our government works - that's a result. I used to hate when people talked about transformative change. I think transformation is bollocks, really. You make things better - let's settle for that. Because this is really hard stuff and government has only part of the role to play in some of this. So how do we make things better? And how can we be sure it's actually going to have a practical demonstrative effect rather than just a gimmick or an initiative or a ribbon to cut? So that was again really interesting, really hard, but some real practical things came out of it. 

The final one was the deep dive on renewable energy, which again got some really good people around the table and I was very impressed. Just before I left being a minister I had a follow up and we published all the information, all the recommendations, the tracking of how it's been followed up. It's pretty much all been actioned and the people we were dealing with in industry all said it made a difference. There's lots of other problems, but at least on the things we set out to try and make better, we did make better. It was not a panacea. It was not transformative. But it takes us into a better place as a result. So I think there's a really good model that can be improved upon and developed by other governments too. 

AP: One follow up on the energy deep dive. Were you quite disciplined in restricting the conversation to things that were devolved? Because in that policy domain, there's to some extent a complex interaction between reserved and devolved matters. 

LW: No, so we weren't passing the buck. There were very clear things we knew we were responsible for and the pressure was very much on for us to do something about it. But inevitably, with other things like the Crown Estate and the National Grid, for example, which very much affected our ability to achieve our objectives - we weren't directly responsible for. But it was clear there were actions that we need to do something about. 

So for example, I think from memory one of the recommendations was to take a far more proactive relationship with Ofgem and make demands of Ofgem, where previously we'd taken a more passive role. So the onus was on Ofgem for sure, but part of the recommendations was for us to change the way we approached Ofgem. Same with the Crown Estate and to be fair it improved as a result. Still a way to go and you know some of the things were beyond the ability of us to influence, because we need to change the regulatory regime, which we couldn't do. So I'm not saying we fixed the problem, but it improved the way we dealt with the problem.

AP: Sure that is what I was getting at – so the actions that came out of it were things very much in your control?

LW: Yes, exactly. You weren’t trying to let yourself off the hook by saying, “If only Westminster did this and this and this”. We certainly touched on it that because that was legitimate. But there were things where we were failing and we need to do better that we also confronted. 

MM: You mentioned earlier that you attended the interministerial groups (IMGs) for transport. Do you recall any particular positive outcomes from those meetings or any frustrations that you faced? 

LW: Well, part of the problem I think is the way that they were structured in the time that I was a minister. In that they were managed by the civil service who would look for the lowest common denominator. They were trying, understandably, to avoid conflict and look at things that we could have a nice meeting about. To a degree that's fine. But it didn't really allow for a proper engagement on areas of genuine disagreement or misalignment. 

Again, they were very stage managed, just like the British Irish Council meetings. Not quite as bad - those really are totally staged. But the IMG ones were a bit like that. The officials had agreed beforehand the areas that we're going to look at and we all had our briefs. I’m still amazed as to the extent to which most ministers just read their brief. I just don't see the point in that - you can get AI to do that. Just reading out loud. What is the purpose of that? I've always tried not to do that and when I was able to find other ministers who were equally willing not to do that, we’d have a far more fruitful exchange. And also when you just confront the fact that, you know, we don't have to agree on this. We all have different political mandates and different parliaments we are accountable to. We don't need to agree. What we need to do is to be honest about differences, accept what can we do together and which bits do we agree that we're not going to do together. That we can learn from each other. There wasn't enough of that sort of culture, I think. Instead, they'd rather, in a very English sort of way, try not to have the argument because we don’t want to upset anyone. Rather than just say let's all be grown-ups here, there are things we can't agree on but there are far more we can agree on.

For example, I remember having very productive IMG meeting with Jesse Norman [then minister of state for decarbonisation and technology 2022–23], who was chairing, on regulation for self-driving cars. That was quite a good one partly because people didn't have such entrenched policy positions because of the nature as a problem of the future. There was one awful meeting I had with a guy, I can’t even remember his name now, but he’d been Boris [Johnson]’s deputy mayor or something in London. He was an Essex politician who had gone to the House of Lords and he was completely out of his depth. It was embarrassingly bad. The officials were embarrassed and he spoke to them really badly. And I just had to call him out, I just thought this is just not on. 

The last one I went to - which really got my hackles up - was a really interesting example of how the attitude of Whitehall to the devolved government is still developing. This is one I didn't normally attend, usually Julie James would attend. But I was stepping in - that was a good thing with our relationship was that we could be interchangeable. So I would drop into her policy areas if she was off or if she's busy, and vice-versa, and so we worked as a team. It did mean that we had to have a grasp of a huge number of policy areas, which was quite taxing. But it was really interesting to be able to do that. 

So there'd been a row over the appointment of the new chair of the UK Climate Change Committee and it had been going on for some time. The UK government had several names that they wanted, who tended to be finance city types, Conservative donors, and Julie James was adamant that she was not going to agree to these people. And there'd been a whole painful process of names put forward for the devolved governments to agree, the devolved governments didn't agree and there was then briefing to the press by the UK government that, you know, devolved governments were getting above their station and they were blocking appointments. I went to the final meeting with Graham Stuart – who when he was appointed was meant to have been one of their stronger ministers. That wasn't ever my experience with him. But he read out a telling off, essentially. Their civil service were outraged that we had the temerity to block this appointment and how disappointed they were that this view had been taken and how this wasn't constructive and this was an important role. 

So I just sat and listened to this five minutes of telling off - which he was reading out. And I just was affronted, I don't get affronted very often. I explained to him in very simple terms there's a misunderstanding here of what the position is. The law says this is a joint appointment. It's not something they agree and we are consulted on or informed about. This is something we all agree on and we didn't agree. There’s no point browbeating us. So rather than sitting down and treating us as equals and saying, “OK, where can we get agreement here?” They just tried to bulldoze their way through their appointments, tried to leak against us. Tried to tell us off in meetings and treat us like children rather than accepting there's a different constitutional arrangement here which had been set out in law where we were partners in something. They were not treating us like partners and bad luck for them, we had the power of veto, which we exercised.

AP: It’s in the Climate Change Act, which Westminster had passed. It’s written into the law, isn't it? 

LW: Yeah, exactly. But the culture of Whitehall very much was, particularly under the Boris Johnson government of muscular unionism, “we know best and we'll tell you what to do and don't rock the boat”. There were times when they got away with that and times when they couldn't get away with. This is one where they couldn't and I was just very robust with him and he had nothing to say because he didn’t have a leg to stand on. It's not about him and his personality, it seems to be a structural, cultural failure at the Whitehall level to understand the nature of our constitutional arrangement. And I think that will probably happen under the Labour government too, because it is endemic to the world-view that lots of Whitehall departments and Westminster politicians have. You know - they're the grown-ups, we’re the toy town. 

AP: Obviously you're not a minister anymore, but viewing it from the outside are you optimistic - or from what you've said, maybe not - that Labour coming in at Westminster will change the nature of intergovernmental relationships?

LW: Well, I think it'll be a lot better because you're a party of the same colour. Instinctively you'll be starting from a similar place. Whereas in a lot of these conversations we were, from a policy point of view, starting from a different place, which is quite legitimate but obviously makes relationships more tense. So it will be a lot easier from that point of view. And there will be times when there are personal relationships as well which will help.

But generally no, I'm not optimistic. I think there is a cultural arrogance in Westminster, amongst the politicians and a structural arrogance amongst some of the officials in the departments in Whitehall who just don't understand devolution. It’s not that they don’t understand it, they're just not interested in it and they don't think anybody should second guess them. I think that's the problem which we will come back to time and again. The dynamic is different now in the Labour party because of the mayors, and I think the mayors will be the driving force for a lot of the changes of relationships because they have more relevant political clout in the Westminster government, because they're from England. They just have a different status. 

So my concern is, based on what I saw in the way they developed policy in opposition, that when the Venn diagram allowed for the mayors and the devolved governments to be in a similar place - great. But the starting point will be, “How do we deliver for the mayors?” Not “How do we deliver for the aspirations of the devolved governments?” So I think there's trouble brewing on that. But in a sense, that's how it should be. There's going to be tension between different layers of government - that's the nature of semi-federal structures. I think we should be quite relaxed about that. I don’t think we should be over sensitive about it. But for it to work there does need to be at least a respect that you are dealing with another government with its own democratic mandate. I suppose local government would say the same about the Welsh government too. So these are somewhat inevitable in the power dynamic. 

But the impression that we all got when dealing with the Westminster government is that we were being dealt with as stakeholders not as fellow governments. Silly little things, like if there's an announcement being made, private office would get a call that morning saying, “is your minister available at 6pm to meet with the minister?” Just to be told something that was already in the Guardian, which is just basically disrespectful that we can't be trusted with sensitive information. Which is just absurd because we deal with sensitive information all the time and we are a government - we're not some junior partner to be dismissed. I think the UK has got a long way to go to maturing its political relationships. 

MM: One of the policies that you are most known for during your time in government is the 20mph policy. I think it'd be interesting to touch on that - can you tell us a bit more about how you went about introducing it? 

LW: I think there were two significant policies in transport that we were able to make during the Mark Drakeford government that I was involved in. One was our approach to road building and then the second is the local speed limits. The speed limit one was in Mark Drakeford’s manifesto when he stood for the leadership and I had role in getting it in that manifesto. So that was a good example of midterm how you change your government priorities. Mark, as a former special adviser, was very keen on getting as much detail into his personal manifesto as possible because he knew he’d then be able to use that to drive the civil service. He created a programme for government based on his manifesto commitments and that was the direction of travel for the government as a whole. So the 20mph was very much set in his manifesto. 

My job when I became minister was to set about enacting that. I had some disagreement with Ken Skates about that because he didn't support the policy and looked to find a very narrow, minimal interpretation of it. And I went over his head to Mark Drakeford to confirm my understanding on the more expansive version of that, which is what we then went with.

The road building is more interesting because that really wasn't in the manifesto. His section on transport in the manifesto didn't mention road building, but nor did it say we were going to take a different approach. His decision on the M4, which was his decision, not a government decision, it was the first minister’s personal decision, and when he announced it he was very careful to say that this is a decision for the M4. It's not a decision for all roads and we should put a ring around this and treat this as a standalone case which I didn't agree with. So it took some effort, I suppose, because obviously, Ken Skates, my colleague was heavily wedded to the M4 as were all the senior civil servants. So that was much more of a process over the two different periods and two different jobs I had in in government. Transport was a theme of both of them, but I had slightly different roles and dynamics in each – Julie James and I were very much on the same page, whereas again Ken Skates and I were not on the same page. 

So during the first period with Ken Skates, I focused on getting a new transport strategy agreed which had modal shift explicitly as an objective with targets, which has never been done before. So that was very much planting the seed. Then as soon as we had the new government, that Ken wasn't part of, and Julie and I were in the climate portfolio (and transport was part of climate, not just not the economic development portfolio) I was able to get agreement straight away to freeze all road building schemes whilst we did a study on how that pipeline of schemes was consistent with our carbon budget and our commitment to double the number of emissions cut over the next 10 years. Which was a major shift in trajectory. Through that we created the roads review led by Dr Lynn Sloman and then through that agreement across government to a new set of thresholds for when road building was allowed. That was a separate conversation and a big and difficult process.

The 20mph policy was a separate process though related. But a different set of tactics to achieve it. 

MM: Across both those issues, you’ve touched on how it can be quite contentious. So how did you go about building support for the policy both inside and outside government? 

LW: Badly, I would say, outside government. For sure. You know, in an ideal world you would bring everybody along with you and you would have the time to do that and you would have the space to do that. My view very much was that these carbon targets - people have not understood how significant the shift is going to be in order to get onto a different trajectory, to meet net zero legal commitments. This five year period is nothing compared to the next five year period and the five year period beyond that is even more difficult again. Very few people within politics have clocked the scale and the pace of change that that requires. So the ability to take time and space to bring everybody along with you is a real tension between the climate science and the democratic framework. And I think there are real tensions both between capitalism and climate change, but also between democracy and climate change. The experience I've had over the last few years, both on speed limits and on road building, is just a toe in the water of how difficult this is going to become and I bear the scars of it. 

But to answer your question on the 20mph policy. What we did was to set up an expert group led by a very credible external figure outside of Wales to bring together the key stakeholders to advise on the implementation. Not to second guess the policy. We were committed to having a default 20mph speed limit. But we want it to work and so all the people whose job it was to make it work – how do we get their buy in to come up with a set of recommendations, that is going to give this a chance of working and helps the people on the ground? It wasn’t about creating something that's so practically difficult that it's not going to be workable. That was my priority. And so we did that and it took over a year. So the whole thing took four years, it wasn’t rushed and it was over the course of two different jobs. I was very fortunate to be in the position to see it through from start to finish which is unusual. 

We worked very much in a co-production model with those who we charged with implementation. The first 20mph Task Force report, led by Phil Jones [an independent transport planner], came up with a set of recommendations how we would approach it. We then had to take regulations through the Senedd, which we did with a two thirds cross party majority. We then had an election, and then it was very much into implementation. We had another set of Senedd votes, which again had two thirds majority cross party - albeit without the Conservatives this time. 

Then we worked with local authorities on the practical implementation. Where the policy has struggled is the gap between the responsibility of the Welsh government in setting the strategy and the overall policy and then with the local implementation. Because on speed limits the Welsh government is the Trunk Roads Highway Authority. [But] it's not the Local Highway Authority and so legally we can't tell councils what to do - they are legally responsible. So we set guidance and we set a law on the default. But it's for local authorities to interpret that for their local roads, and that's where we come into difficulties, because in practice the local authorities wanted us to tell them what to do.

We set out principles, but we couldn't decide on a road by road basis for every part of Wales what the speed limit should be. Some local authorities have taken, I think, a mature response to that. Others have really struggled with it largely because of austerity cuts and capacity within local highway authorities. And also their real risk aversion, where they think about liability and they think of about national standards and compliance – that’s just the culture of highways engineers. “Give me a manual - I will implement the manual. Don't expect me to colour outside the lines”. Also COVID really knocked our ability to do the amount of preparatory consultation work at the local level that we wanted to do and needed to do. So A) we were running behind schedule, B) we were dealing with local authorities that had neither the culture nor the capacity to do this properly and C) within a legal cultural framework, which was always going to cause us problems. So the implementation of it has been bumpy. 

It was always going to be bumpy but, despite the discomfort, even 10 months in we can say with confidence that it's working. Speed limits are down and the casualties are down. But the most political pain has come from areas who did the least variation from the guidance. Those authorities that have consulted locally and taken a common sense approach, it's been largely accepted. Those that have done a literal approach of the guidance and have really been reticent to apply their common sense, that's where the petition - which was a record breaking half a million signatories petition - the greatest number of signatures came from those areas that had done the least number of exceptions. So we're now trying to unpick that and give them the confidence to apply the powers they have. So it was always going to be hard and it was hard, but I think it is a policy that in a few short years’ time, we will look back and think, “I'm glad we did that”. 

MM: And on a personal note, what was it like facing like a no confidence vote in yourself in the Senedd? 

LW: Uncomfortable for sure. The confidence motion didn't bother me so much because that was just political theatrics. I suppose the one thing I've struggled with is how little political support I've had from anyone really. If you look at the social media accounts of any of my political colleagues, nobody has been out there defending the policy, which is a collective policy. It's been left to me. So that's been quite difficult, clearly. In the run up to the election it was also very difficult. That's understandable. I also had a fair amount of personal abuse, insults and threats around it. Which again is not unexpected if you look through the history of it – [Leslie] Hore-Belisha, the transport secretary who introduced the Belisha beacons, had vandalism and had huge pushback. Barbara Castle, who introduced breathalysers, had death threats. The seat belt law in the early 80s was hugely controversial, with massive pushback. So anytime you tackle our car dependency culture, there is resistance. I was expecting that, but the difference in the abstract and the personal reality is difficult. 

So I felt a bit of a pariah politically because of it, which hasn't been much fun. I wish we could have implemented the policy in in a different way, as I'd wanted to do it with more consultation and more flexibility. But I remember an old colleague of mine once saying to me, “If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing badly”. What he means is, “if you know it’s the right thing to do, it’s worth doing even if it’s imperfect”. And I think this is a case of one of those where it's always going be hard and the implementation wasn't perfect. But we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. It is good. 

AP: And what led to your decision that you took in spring of this year that you would step down? That you wouldn't want to continue under new first minister Vaughan Gething?

LW: Two things really. Firstly, I was just personally burnt out, exhausted and battered by the whole experience. It's been really, really difficult. COVID, an election, and a very intense new ministry in which the amount of policy reform the two of us had to do - and we haven't really touched on how under powered the Welsh government as a civil service is. The amount of energy I've had to throw at these areas to get movement has been very significant and has taken its toll. So there's definitely a sense that I needed the break.

But also politically, I didn't support the new first minister. I wasn't comfortable serving under him and I wanted to take that decision out of his hands. I also knew that he was not sympathetic to the policy direction I've been pursuing and that's fair enough. So I thought it'd be better to step back, recharge my battery and try and make a positive of that. 

AP: So you took that decision before Vaughan Gething became first minister. What’s your brief assessment of the difficulties he’s faced? [NB this interview was conducted a day before Vaughan Gething announced his resignation]

LW: Well, first of all, I think it's very sad. I do feel genuinely sad the way that it's unravelled because I've known him a long time – I was at university with Vaughan Gething and I’ve always be on good terms with him. I've no personal animus towards him and I feel sorry that it's got to this point. This sounds unkind, but I always thought his arrogance would be his undoing and I take no satisfaction in in seeing that come to pass. I think he's handled things extremely poorly and shown really bad judgement. Out of a desperation and a hunger to become first minister without any real sense of purpose as to why he wanted to become first minister. 

I think that's part of the problem here. Where you’ve got some judgement blind spots which have allowed him to take a level of funding that was unforeseen, when the rules for funding were set. Four times larger than the spending cap that was agreed. He didn't break any rules, because he worked around the rules but it was still against the spirit of the rules. And also that money was from people who you should not be taking money from in a Labour leadership election. 

That's made us very vulnerable and made him very vulnerable, and I think that he hasn't been able to recover from that because he's just not seen to have been legitimate. He's won a very narrow leadership election with a grotesque imbalance of forces on his side and without any contrition that he's done anything wrong. I think that just doesn't pass the common sense doorstep test. Very sad to say, I genuinely take no pleasure from it.

I think it's caused us enormous damage. For all the criticisms of Mark Drakeford’s decisions he made as first minister (and that's bound to happen when you're making such difficult decisions) there was a sense that he was doing it for the right reasons. Even if you disagreed with them, he was doing it from a place of moral judgement. He was doing what he thought was right. I think unfortunately, given the controversy over the way Vaughan has handled donations, we've lost that moral high ground and I think that could be fatal to us as a political project. Because now we just seem the same as everybody else. That's what I find so distressing about it and I that's why I spoke out against it. 

I think this idea of ‘norm spoiling’ that I came across as I was thinking. This idea that suddenly by saying, “well, we haven't broken any rules, therefore there's nothing to see here” - it's still wrong. It's not about the paperwork. It's about, “was it the right judgement?” and it wasn't the right judgement. By trying to shrug that off you are then lowering what you think is acceptable as political behaviour, and that then sets a different lower norm. That's what we've seen in the UK government and we were meant to be better than that. Devolution is meant to be better than that.

I was part of the campaign to create this place. The posters on my wall, they’re all from the campaigns from 1997 and 2011. I am signed up to the project of seeing devolution as a different way of doing politics, of being accountable, transparent and closer to the public you serve. And also having a different political agenda. That's why I'm doing this and for someone to come along and just subvert, for me, the moral underpinnings of that project I find very painful. 

AP: To wrap up, what are you proudest of from your time in government? And conversely, what would you consider your biggest mistake?

LW: I think I'm most proud of the change to the road building approach in Wales because I think we've made some changes to the underpinning wirings of how decisions are made which I think will last. The degree of change that was required in the way that the civil service thinks and works has been enormous. I think that is a collective achievement. But it's a bigger achievement because if we stick to it, it's a very significant change - not just in process, but in culture. And I think that's hard to do. 

I think I regret the most that we were not able to implement 20mph policy the way we wanted to and should have. And also some of the (flippant at times) comments that I've made which have been seized on by people to undermine the serious ideas that I’ve been making – and that’s on me. 

AP: Finally, what would be your central advice for someone coming into ministerial office for the first time? 

LW: Don't be afraid to make an argument for doing it differently. I think there's far too much acceptance of ,“this is the way we do things” or, “keep your head down, go along with the group thinking”. And I think the great privilege of being both the elected representative and the minister is the platform it gives you and the power in that platform to make an argument for change. That's what I've tried to do, to not accept that, you know, “we're going to build a motorway, so why bother arguing?” It's to say, “we don't need to do it like that”. Let's make the counter argument because so often the counter argument isn’t made, and therefore a decision is made by default almost. That's the bit I've tried to fight, to resist the sense of inevitability of a direction of travel. I think we've got to be far more courageous in disrupting thinking to recognise the scale of the challenges we're facing and the genuine dangers to democracy in our political culture that we face if we don't have the courage to confront the scale of the peril that the times bring…. I should have finished on a joke really, shouldn’t I? 

One thing we didn’t touch on was training for incoming ministers because you don’t get any induction. When I started and said “is there any training?”, I was given a copy of Ministers Reflects. Which I had already read! That was it. I think it needs to be taken far more seriously. Being a minister is a very different job to being a backbencher. It’s a completely different language, different set of people, different culture, different procedures. It’s overwhelming and it takes a while to understand how it works, and how you use your levers of power. How to do it properly and not make mistakes. How to ask for advice. What’s permissible? What’s not permissible? It’s a minefield and there is no real preparation for it – that needs to change.