Plaid Cymru offers Community Wealth Building plan for Wales
By Joe Guinan and Neil McInroy
April 29, 2025
At a time when so much economic policy thinking and -making is pointed in exactly the wrong direction, it is worth celebrating those rare moments when the dark storm clouds part and even the faintest glimmerings of a ray of light appear.
Such a moment occurred yesterday, when Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, released Making Wales Work, their economic strategy document for 2026 and beyond.
Weighing in at just over a hundred pages, Making Wales Work is a substantial piece of economic policy thinking, one of very few public policy strategies in Britain recently that contains anything like the tools and interventions necessary to grapple with the scale and magnitude of the social, economic, and environmental challenges that loom ahead.
Most encouraging of all, it contains both a deep political economy analysis of Welsh economic underperformance in recent decades and a roadmap of radical but practical policies to transform Wales – with Community Wealth Building methods and approaches at their heart.
It is not surprising to see such a document from Plaid Cymru.
Back in 2012, the Welsh nationalist party was perhaps the first electorally significant party to offer a serious break with Britain’s stultifying decades-old neoliberal economic policy consensus with the publication of Plaid Cymru’s Plan C, which offered a bold seven-point plan around progressive public procurement, support for cooperatives, credit unions and social enterprises, and a number of innovative investment proposals tantamount to a Welsh industrial strategy in embryo.
“Making Wales Work contains both a deep political economy analysis of Welsh economic underperformance in recent decades and a roadmap of radical but practical policies to transform Wales – with Community Wealth Building methods and approaches at their heart.”
Yesterday’s document, issued by Luke Fletcher, Member of the Senedd for South Wales West and the party’s spokesperson on the economy, is a far more developed programme. This reflects both the maturing of such ideas in a Welsh context (where there has been much discussion of the foundational economy) and the shifting politics that may now be creating a new opening around an economic transformation agenda for Plaid Cymru, given the evident and fundamental shortcomings of Labour in the Starmer era.
For a time in the intervening period, Plaid Cymru had struggled to demonstrate the existence of meaningful clear radical water between Labour and themselves, with the previous Labour administration in Cardiff willing to entertain many aspects of such an agenda, if not always to enact them.
Indeed, at one point The Democracy Collaborative and the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) were asked by ministers to create recommendations for a Community Wealth Building-led approach to post-COVID-19 economic recovery and reconstruction in Wales.
Today, however, with a Starmerite Labour austerity regime in Westminster doubling down on the Blackrock-oriented economy of upwards financial extraction, there is a yawning political chasm on the progressive left where economic solutions capable of making a material difference to ordinary people ought to be.
Making Wales Work is a deeply serious strategy to fill this economic policy void with substantive solutions. First, it is clear on the nature of the problem, even using an explicit political economy framework to explicate it.
The document pledges “a new approach to economic development in Wales which is underpinned by consideration of – and which seeks progressive new answers to – the four key questions of political economy,” namely:
Who owns what?
Who does what?
Who gets what?
What do they do with it?
It is rare to see a mainstream political party so unambiguous on the centrality of political economy, and of the fundamental (but politically awkward) significance of the matter of who owns capital and who gains from economic activity – something with which we wholeheartedly agree!
As the new paper sets out, “there is one foundational problem above all that this plan looks to overcome. That problem is the ownership gap”:
“Simply put, too few of Wales’ businesses, assets and institutions are meaningfully Welsh-owned, with consequences for investment; business growth and agglomeration; the availability and quality of jobs; and research, development and innovation among other drivers of economic development. Crucially, it sees too little of Wales’ wealth recycled in and put to work for the benefit of Wales’ communities, and too much of it flowing out in the form of corporate profits for businesses headquartered outside of Wales. Addressing the ‘ownership gap’ at a range of scales, from the national to the local, is fundamental if we are to see a reversal in Wales’ economic fortunes.” (p. 11)
This is very much in accord with our own view of the centrality of ownership. Who owns and controls productive capital is among the most fundamental questions of any political economy. Our worsening problems are not accidental but hardwired into how our economy functions.
The institutional arrangements at the heart of today’s economy – private ownership, credit creation by commercial banks, global capital markets, giant publicly traded multinational corporations – together form a powerful engine for the extraction of value. These relationships drive the outcomes we are seeing in terms of economic inequality, the regional wealth gap, and growing climate danger.
In response, Making Wales Work sets out a programme of economic change and transformation that includes significant measures to democratize the economy, including support for the local solidarity economy of cooperatives and social enterprises, reform of the Development Bank of Wales, creation of a new National Development Agency, and a whole section on the deployment of Community Wealth Building approaches. (“We need to stop talking about these ideas and get on with it,” Fletcher urges in the foreword.)
To underscore their seriousness of purpose, the party has also spelled out what such an approach would mean in the case of the tribulations of the Tata Steel production facilities in Port Talbot, drawing upon the Mondragón model: “Plaid Cymru has called for the nationalisation of Tata’s operations in Wales, as a pathway to the creation of a workers’ co-op at Port Talbot steelworks, in the Basque mould.”
“Plaid Cymru has called for the nationalisation of Tata’s operations in Wales, as a pathway to the creation of a workers’ co-op at Port Talbot steelworks, in the Basque mould.”
This is what an actual community-sustaining industrial strategy should look like – in clear contrast to the malign negligence of Tories and Labour alike when it comes to government intervention to preserve domestic steel production capacity and capability. It recalls the fight against shutdowns and for joint worker-community ownership of steel beginning in Youngstown, Ohio in the 1970s which ultimately gave birth to our own organization and to Community Wealth Building as a strategy.
There are doubtless areas in which Plaid’s new economic approach needs further work or clarification – the devil is always in the detail of implementation and application. But it is admirably bold and clear-sighted on both the nature of the economic problems facing the Welsh economy and the scale and magnitude of the interventions that might plausibly make a difference. This separates it out from the vast bulk of what passes for economic policy talk from the three parties currently jostling for votes on the far right of Britain’s political spectrum – Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, and the Labour Party of Keir Starmer.
This deliberate foreshortening of political horizons and shallowness of perspective, at a time of deepening social and economic crises, is as dangerous as it is unnecessary. With Making Wales Work, Plaid Cymru is attempting to chart a very different course out of the crisis, providing some much-needed resources of hope. One cannot help thinking that Raymond Williams would have approved.
Previous work in support of Community Wealth Building in Wales (where CLES has advised in the past) and present work in Scotland show the potential of progressive avenues for change at the devolved government level, despite the forbidding reactionary roadblocks of UK-wide politics today. If change is ever to come to a beleaguered Britain, we are better off looking to the devolved administrations of Wales and Scotland for openings and opportunities rather than to the benighted Parliament at Westminster, which continues to represent the interests of an ossified and unreformed British state to the people and not vice versa.
An old and valuable political lesson must be relearned once again; nobody is coming to save us, we have only ourselves upon which to rely for the necessary economic transformation our time demands.
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Making Wales Work: Plaid Cymru's New Economic Plan can be found here.
