The former Senedd member who masterminded Wales’ default 20mph speed limit has admitted the policy “came at a price” as he warned that Welsh Labour now faces an “existential crisis.”
Lee Waters, who served as a Welsh Government transport minister and held the Llanelli seat for a decade, said watching his party’s collapse at last month’s election had been a “painful and frustrating experience.”
Labour was reduced to just nine seats on 7 May, finishing third behind Plaid Cymru on 43 and Reform UK on 34 — its worst result since Welsh devolution began in 1999.
Waters described it as a “slow-motion car crash,” and said the party had been “saved from wipe out” by the narrowest of margins.
“We came within 4,000 votes of the Conservatives, that’s how bad it was,” he told BBC Radio Wales’ Sunday Supplement.
The former minister said there was “no single reason why Labour collapsed,” but argued that confronting the scale of the defeat had to come first.
“This is an existential crisis and I think Labour now needs to go back to first principles and rethink what it is for,” he said.
It was Waters who, as deputy minister, drove through the law setting a default 20mph limit on Wales’ restricted roads — a policy that drew one of the largest petitions in Senedd history and became a lightning rod for opposition across the Swansea, Carmarthenshire and Neath Port Talbot areas.
Asked about its role in the defeat, he did not shy away from it. “There are things like 20mph that definitely took up a lot of political capital and caused a lot of difficulty,” he said.
“We took a hit for that, you know, I’m not denying that. It’s achieved great things, but it’s come at a price.”
Waters stood down at the election. His old Llanelli constituency was abolished under the new Senedd boundaries and absorbed into the enlarged six-member Sir Gaerfyrddin seat, which combines the Caerfyrddin and Llanelli Westminster areas and now covers the whole of Carmarthenshire. Plaid Cymru and Reform UK took all six seats there.
His warning echoes the reckoning already under way among Labour figures closer to home. Swansea MS Mike Hedges, one of the nine Labour members left standing, drew criticism after appearing to blame the media for the result, telling a reporter outside the Senedd they had “got the result you wanted.”
Hedges, who held the Gŵyr Abertawe seat, had earlier warned that Wales could face another election within a year as the party counted the cost of its historic defeat.
Waters also turned to the challenges now facing the new Plaid Cymru government, suggesting the move from opposition to power would force difficult choices.
He pointed to First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth’s pledge to tackle congestion on the M4 with a “roads-based solution,” after Labour shelved plans for an M4 relief road around Newport in 2019.
“Will it be easy to deliver? No, it won’t, nor will it be cheap,” Waters said, adding that in opposition a party is “not forced to confront the trade-offs” that come with governing.
A Welsh Labour spokesperson said the results had been “catastrophic” and that the party needed time to determine what went wrong.
“Voters raised serious issues about NHS access, roads, local services, cost of living and trust in politics,” the spokesperson said. “These are the issues people live with every day and they felt we weren’t doing anything to help. We can’t ignore that.”
Before entering the Senedd, Waters was head of the active travel charity Sustrans Cymru — a background that shaped his championing of walking, cycling and lower urban speeds throughout his time in government.
The 20mph law remains in force, though the new Welsh Government has faced continued pressure over its implementation.
