Mabon ap Gwynfor laughs when I ask him if the smile on his face and glint in his eye will still be there if we meet in his office in 18 months time for a follow up interview. Currently the party’s health spokesperson in the Senedd, by then, he hopes he’ll be more than a year into the job he is desperate for, to be the man to fix Wales’ health service.
A lifelong Plaid Cymru campaigner, he was out on the streets of Carmarthen with his grandfather, and Plaid’s first ever MP, Gwynfor Evans, when he was just four years old.
A party member since his teenage years, when he went to Bangor University, he set up the party’s branch there. The now 47-year-old was elected to the Senedd in 2021 to represent Dwyfor Meirionydd and now, as his first term ends, his eyes are on the big prize.
Married with four kids, representing a north Wales constituency, his job already sees his week split in two, but that would be nothing compared to if he gets the health gig, a job few relish. Ensure our latest news and sport headlines always appear at the top of your Google Search by making us a Preferred Source. Click here to activate or add us as Preferred Source in your Google search settings
Health will be a key election issue, so why should voters choose him, his party, I ask.
“We’ve done the work, we’ve identified the problems and we’ve identified most of the solutions,” he says, but he issues a note of caution. “We have to be clear it’s not going to be done in four years. There are deep structural problems in the NHS,” he says.
“Some of it can be done pretty soon, we can put things in place in the first 100 days around governance, around transparency and answerability but the longer term stuff, it’s going to be two terms,” he says.
Given we meet before the party has published its manifesto, there are not yet policies to quiz him on but there is plenty of ground to cover. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here.
We start with two of the biggest, most topical issues in the Welsh NHS, the state of the country’s main hospital – University Hospital of Wales – and the Betsi Cadwaladr health board. What would he do to fix them?
The current government, he says, has “outsourced responsibility” and left it with the health boards themselves. “That’s easy to do, is blame someone else all of the time, instead of taking responsibility,” he says.
We discuss comments made a few days earlier where the First Minister said she was “waiting” for a report to be released to her. He disputes that. “The government has powers. They could use directives and they could insist,” he says.
“Ultimately, the buck stops with the Welsh Government, with the minister, with the First Minister, but they’re refusing to take responsibility and they’ve done that all along.”
The physical state of the hospital has recently been highlighted to a growing extent.
“Amongst the things that we’d prioritise is sorting out the backlog in the estates. There’s over a billion pounds worth of fixing to be done there. We won’t be able to afford new hospitals of the size of the University Hospital of Wales, clearly, because the UK Government don’t provide the capital funds for things like that. So we’d put the case forward, absolutely. But we have to think differently. How are we going to deliver services differently here?”
Can they fund all those repairs? “No, there’s no capital at the moment, so it’s a matter of prioritising.”
One idea he discusses is to take services out of the hospital, effectively mothballing parts of it, until they can afford to fix them. Putting services they can in different – better – buildings in the city.
“Why not look at taking services out of hospitals into the community?,” he asks.
His party leader hasn’t ruled out carving up the health board that covers the north of Wales. “We’re not ruling anything out at the moment.,” his health spokesman confirms.
“There are fundamental deep structural problems in Betsi to do with culture and governance. It’s still effectively multiple health boards in one even though you’ve got one board.”
“There’s lack of communication there, there’s a lack of leadership when it comes to the government saying ‘this needs to be sorted out’,” he says.
He wants an advisor there, to see day to day what is happening and report back to government to ensure they’re “answerable”.
He expands on the further things the party wants to change. “We know that the problem in health in Wales with the two ends of care, primary care and social care,” he says.
“All the attention has been put on secondary care, all the money’s been put in secondary care, this government have ploughed in £1.5bn into the waiting list scandal over the last four years and we’ve seen them go down a little bit and then back up and down a little bit, back up.
“The solutions that they’ve put in place are sticking plasters, they’re not long term, they’ve basically outsourced or insourced some services, but it’s not structural change.
“If we’re going to do anything with the health service, we need to unblock the bottleneck in social care.
“If you go to Morriston, the second largest hospital in Wales, tens of thousands of people go through Morriston every week, of those tens of thousands of people, and the 400,000 people in Swansea Bay and the wider Hywel Dda, Cardiff, Powys area, about 100 people blocked the beds with late discharges in Morriston. That’s the figure we’re looking at which is causing that backlog.
“Across Wales, it’s around 1,300 people.”
He added: “That’s what’s stopping the service from working. That’s not insurmountable, that’s not a problem that can’t be solved.
“It’s a case of finding care at home, care in the community.
“We need care workers, around 400 care workers we need across Wales. Again, that is not insurmountable.
“At the other end is primary care. We’ve seen the amount of money going into primary care fall year on year. We’re now at a record low, around 6% of health budget goes into primary care.
“Now primary care is primarily GP services. There are other parts of it, absolutely, I’m not saying they’re less important. Primary care is where we need to focus if we’re going to make sure that we stop people going into hospital in the first place.
“So we need to ensure that there’s more funding going there.
“We need to employ more GPs, we need to retain the GPs that we have, that’s a problem. GPs are getting older, a lot of them want to leave the system because of stress, and that we recruit new ones and keep them once they’re recruited.
“If we train them in Wales, at the moment we know we’ve got a lot to leave in Wales.
“Some can’t find work, so they go to Australia, New Zealand or Canada. We need to keep them here.
“There are ways that we can keep them, if we make it an attractive proposition for them.
“That means taking some of the headaches away with overheads if they become a partner in the GP practice, so that they don’t have to think about how the business is run, they can concentrate on looking after patients.
“A GP at the moment will have what, seven or 10 minutes with a patient? That’s not enough and if you’re a locum, you don’t even know the background of that patient.
“More GPs coming into the system, a more multidisciplinary approach, getting GP surgeries to work together more, building on that cluster model that we have, so following the Northern Irish lead where you’ve got federated GP surgeries, so that you can do more services in the GP cluster rather than the hospital, and then you can take some of the back office cost away because they work together more, that gives them more time because you’ve got more GP working hours.
“If you’ve more time, you’ve less referrals to the clinician, less pathways, which means less people going on waiting lists, which then helps with that and blocking the system.”
A job like health secretary comes with a personal sacrifice. How, I ask him, does he plan – if he gets the job – to balance life, his family, and the job.
“I think if you go into the job unprepared, then you will find yourself extremely tired for being busy, being busy.
“If you don’t have a clear vision and a clear agenda of what you want to achieve, then you’re going to be inundated with all sorts of things that you need to do, all sorts letters you need sign, visits you need make, people you need see, but they’re not strategically important.
“They’re just busy doing the things that you need to do day to day and that’s how you burn yourself out.”
There is a clear perception from different parts of Wales that the south gets everything. Will, I ask him, that change if the next First Minister, and senior ministers are from the north.
“I think it would change it. You just need to look at when Ieuan Wyn Jones was deputy First Minister, where under his tenure you had more investment in infrastructure in the north Wales.
“We had the Porthmadog bypass being developed, we’ve had the Newtown bypass which took a long while but nevertheless that’s finished now, and in West Wales we had road infrastructure developed there because there was a greater understanding of the needs of those communities.”
He tells a story about being on a bus in Cardiff, and two women were talking to him, who had been in the Valleys but were heading to the capital.
“They were talking about how things were getting worse in their community. I think they were in Splott, and they said, ‘everything goes to Cardiff Bay‘ and if you go up to the valleys, they say ‘everything goes to Cardiff’. And if you go west, ‘everything goes to Cardiff’. And north? ‘Everything goes to Cardiff’, it’s a cultural thing.
“Wales is an impoverished country at the moment. So we’re all seeing how things aren’t improving and therefore we’re all thinking that everything is going to a neighbourhood nearby.
“There is some legitimacy to that criticism, for people in North Wales and West Wales and Mid Wales coming into Cardiff you’ll see cranes everywhere, you’ll see a lot of development, but you know Cardiff isn’t getting its share, Wales is generally not getting our share of the UK resources, so it’s a national problem,” he says.
He doesn’t dispute me saying that as a Welsh speaker from a Plaid heartland who believes Wales would be better off as an independent country – he is an archetypal Plaid supporter.
And yet, the party he supports is currently following a policy position – under leader Rhun ap Iorwerth – where it will not push for any independence referendum in any first term of government, if it’s elected.
His leader says any first term would be to prove to voters they can deliver and only then would any possible independence referendum be on the table.
It is a marked departure from previous administrations and one I’m curious if diehard independence supporters like him back.
“I’ve been campaigning for independence all my life, but we’re understanding of the situation,” he says.
“We know that Wales is on a journey, we know that independence can’t be delivered overnight, and we know we need to win the argument and get people over to understanding why we need independence.
“We don’t want independence for constitutional purposes, for its own sake. The campaigners, and I’m in their midst, understand that independence is for a purpose which is to improve the lives of the people of Wales. That’s why we want it.”
He “absolutely gets” Rhun ap Iorwerth’s position. “That’s where I was before he said it, that is where I am now. Because we, as I said, we can’t win an independence referendum overnight.
“There’s no point in kidding ourselves that’s going to happen.
“We know where the polls are. We’ve seen them increase considerably over the last six or seven years but there’s still a way to go yet to win people over, so we need to show that, as a party, we are the party that, yes, supports independence but we need to ensure that we’re credible as a governing party, that we can run the show within the powers that we’ve got and then make the case,” he says.
One of the changes for the new-look Senedd is that it will be a four, not five year term. That puts the pressure on Plaid to deliver.
“We need to get in this time, first of all. We’ve not won this election yet so that’s the biggest hurdle that we have. Let’s convince people that we are the right party to govern Wales and to push Wales forward in this election.
“I’m convinced that we have the ideas to put in place and make a difference over the next four years which will then, in turn, if we’re in that position, convince people that they need to vote us back in then.”
How often, I ask him, does independence come up with him. Especially as Labour makes it a key attack line, recently turning to use an attack that Plaid are “separatists”.
“It’s not the salient issue that Labour and the Conservatives think it is. It’s not a vote loser. When Labour and the Conservatives go on about it, I say, ‘bring it on’.
“People know that we’re pro-independence. It’s baked in.”
Is that telling as to how disenfranchised voters are with Labour, that they will vote for Plaid in full knowledge of their independence position, even if it worries them.
“The saliency is around the cost-of-living, the public services, the quality of opportunities that they have in Wales.
“These are the salient issues that people are concerned about and that’s what people will be voting on.
“They’re coming over because they like what they’re hearing. That’s nice from a political point of view because we’re always hearing about people saying, ‘oh, it’s a negative vote, they’re going to vote for Plaid Cymru because we are not Labour’. ‘They are going to go for Plaid Cymru because they want to block Reform’. There’s certainly an element of that, absolutely, let’s not deny it but that’s not the only issue, they’re also coming over because they know we’re a trusted party”.
The image of a Plaid voter has – I put to him – traditionally been a Welsh speaker from one of the heartlands, northwest Wales or Ceredigion, for example. But the party isn’t just expected to grow in those places, but all across Wales. I ask him something I ask a lot of Plaid figures, do they believe a Plaid Cymru voter has changed?
“Possibly,” he says. “The political culture of Wales has always been on the centre left, and that’s where Plaid is placed and so people vote for Plaid for various reasons.
“If you go back to when Gwynfor won in 1966 in Carmarthen, independence wasn’t an issue, and the people who voted Gwynfor in 1966 didn’t do so because of independence.
“And when Plaid Cymru nearly won in the Rhondda and in Caerphilly in the 60s they did that for multiple reasons.
“People support the party for different reasons and Plaid Cymru has a more coherent policy platform that people can support, but with someone like Reform, people project onto Reform what they want or think Reform should be, but there’s no substance to that, and that’s a problem.”
Asked why he thinks the Labour vote has collapsed now, he refers back to 2021. “I think we would have seen a greater collapse in the Labour vote post-Covid in that election if Covid hadn’t happened,” he said.
“A lot of people voted for Labour in the 2021 election because of the Covid situation, because of the old ‘cuddly uncle Mark [Drakeford] but we would have seen it collapse sooner,” he says.
People have lost faith, he says. There is a generational shift of people not following their family’s voting habits, plus Keir Starmer’s administration, he says, is “tone deaf”.
It has all come to a point where he, and his party, are not just electioneering
Surely, I say, that’s all beyond his wildest dreams.
“Yeah, but it’s all hypothetical and theoretical still,” he says. “I’ve been canvassing since I was four years old. I’ve been doing this for the best part of my life, over 40 years, and I know I genuinely haven’t experienced anything like this.”
The polls are great, he admits, yet, he doesn’t think they’re right to be projecting such high numbers across the board for Plaid Cymru.
“I go knocking doors every week, twice a week, and the response is really good, frighteningly good, in places where you wouldn’t expect it to be.
“But people are saying, ‘yeah, actually we want something different, we’re going to vote for Plaid’. Some will say ‘we don’t support independence, we don’t support you on your long-term project, but we will vote for you because we want something different’ or ‘you’re the best of the bad bunch’. So that’s fine, if we can take that in places where we’ve historically had 5% of the vote, that’s amazing.
But Reform is also really strong, he says, and there is a big anti-politics feeling, he says. “What I’m keeping in mind is the Brexit referendum, where everybody was talking up that we were going to have Remain and all of that story, and we didn’t, because we underpriced the Brexiteers.
“So we can’t afford to underprice Reform,” he said.
“We have to appreciate and accept that life is difficult for a lot of people and because of their difficulties, the cost-of-living crisis, their income hasn’t increased since 2008, rents have gone up, food’s gone up, all of these things, they’re looking to blame someone, they are looking to tear down the system and so a lot people are going towards Reform, we get that.”
Having been at the most recent Reform UK event, what struck me, I say, was that the phrase “Britain is broken” kept being used. Is that right, I ask him.
“No, I don’t think it would be fair to say that Wales is broken.
“Being broken means that you throw something away and rebuild something completely different or buy something different in.
“My concern with that sort of terminology is that it allows the thinking that we need to, for instance, scrap the NHS and bring in private health providers instead of the NHS.
“It means that we outsource everything like what Reform want, we can’t allow that. That’s not where we’re at.
“We’re in a situation, if you look at health, where things are really difficult. Staff are struggling, the estate is crumbling or creaking, but it is eminently fixable.
“The government in Wales, they’re depending on the UK government to come and do something different. Instead of saying, ‘oh, let’s find a solution that we can do something about’.”
That smile, that enthusiasm is beaming from him even as he’s listed all the things to do, and to fix. It’s a staggering level of optimism, I put to him.
“I’ve not been in this position before to be able to get into government and do something about it and I want to be.
“I’m genuinely convinced if we put these ideas into practise, people will have better outcomes”.
