Plaid Cymru’s flagship childcare policy is at the centre of the new Senedd’s first major row — one that has split Reform UK‘s local members down the middle and set the chamber’s two largest opposition parties at each other’s throats.
The universal offer — 20 hours of funded childcare a week, 48 weeks a year, for all children aged nine months to four — was the centrepiece of Plaid’s election campaign, and is billed by the Welsh Government as the most generous in the UK.
It was Reform’s own debate on the policy on Wednesday that lit the fuse — and the party’s Swansea Bay and Carmarthenshire members ended up on opposite sides.
Steven Rodaway, Reform Member for Gŵyr Abertawe, voted for the final, amended motion — while his party colleague in the same constituency, Francesca O’Brien, voted against.
The split was repeated in Sir Gaerfyrddin, where Carmelo Colasanto backed the amended motion while fellow Reform Members Gareth Beer and Sarah Edwards opposed it — and David Mills and Iain McIntosh, Reform Members for Brycheiniog Tawe Nedd, which takes in Pontardawe and the Swansea Valley, also voted in favour.
In all, 11 of Reform’s 34 Members backed the final motion, 21 voted against and one abstained.
The sequence matters. Reform’s original motion — demanding the Welsh Government publish full costings and an implementation timetable for the policy — was defeated by 39 votes to 52, with only the Welsh Conservatives in support.
An amendment from Plaid Cymru’s Heledd Fychan then deleted Reform’s wording and replaced it — inserting a line noting that “Reform UK had no commitments on childcare in its Welsh manifesto”. It passed by 50 votes to 41 with Conservative support, and every Reform Member present, including the 11, voted against it.
It was the final vote — on the motion as amended, which by then also recognised the Welsh Government’s commitment to provide an update on the policy’s initial costings and phasing — that split the Reform group, passing by 61 votes to 29.
The Welsh Conservatives pounced. Sam Rowlands, the party’s shadow minister for education and families, said better childcare had been a key part of his party’s manifesto and that it would “vote with any party seeking to increase childcare provision”.
“What surprised everyone was that 11 Reform MSs voted with us and Plaid to attack their own party,” he said. “Either Reform MSs have no idea what they were doing or one third have decided to attack their own party. Either way it does not suggest that they are a party ready for Government.”
Reform hit back within hours — in a letter to Conservative leader Darren Millar from Llŷr Powell, the party’s Member for Blaenau Gwent Caerffili Rhymni, accusing the Conservatives of voting with Plaid Cymru to “delete” Reform’s motion demanding the costings.
Mr Powell turned Mr Rowlands’ own debate words back on him — “If a policy is genuinely affordable, then publishing those full costings should strengthen confidence in it, not weaken it” — and asked whether it was “now Welsh Conservative policy to give the Plaid Government a blank cheque on the implementation of all of their policies”.
The letter opened with a barb about Mr Millar’s absence — “I hope you’re well, given your absence from the Chamber yesterday” — and the voting record shows the Conservative leader did not vote in any of the four divisions.
Reform also escalated the costs argument — publishing a costing paper, produced under the party’s Reform Wales branding and described by its shadow finance minister Cai Parry-Jones as independent, claiming the childcare offer would cost between £388m and £710m a year at full rollout, with a central estimate of £587m and a cost across this Senedd term of nearly £1.4bn.
That is far above the figure of around £400m a year cited in the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ post-election briefing — a figure Reform’s paper claims does not appear in Plaid’s manifesto and “appears to have been supplied” to the IFS by the party. The IFS itself warned last month that finding £400m a year “would likely require cutbacks to other services or increases in taxation”.
The debate itself saw criticism of the government’s timetable from across the chamber — Welsh Labour’s Lynne Neagle said the Senedd had heard “warm words and vague timelines”, while Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Jane Dodds said it was “very perplexing” that Reform had brought the motion despite having made no childcare commitment in its own manifesto.
Plaid’s Sarah Rees went on the attack over Reform’s record on the issue, describing a claim made by one of the party’s candidates during the election campaign — that abuse in nurseries would rise under expanded childcare — as “misogyny and fearmongering, plain and simple”.
The minister delivering the policy is also a local voice — Deputy First Minister Sioned Williams, Plaid Member for Brycheiniog Tawe Nedd, representing the same constituency as two of the 11 Reform Members who backed the amended motion.
The day before the debate, she unveiled an Expert Steering Group to drive the rollout, with 12.5 hours of funded childcare for all two-year-olds delivered first — saying the offer would “help families with the cost of living” and “give all children the best start in life”.
Swansea Bay News asked Mr Rodaway and Mr Colasanto why they voted for the amended motion having opposed the amendment itself, and asked the Reform UK Senedd group whether the vote had been a free vote. No responses had been received by our deadline; any received will be added to this article.
Childcare was a prominent theme across nearly every party’s manifesto at May’s election — and with Plaid governing as a minority in a 96-seat chamber, Wednesday’s debate is unlikely to be the last time the arithmetic produces a result nobody quite intended.
