A love letter to the incoming Welsh Government

I should start by being honest about the title.

This isn’t a love letter in the traditional sense. What follows over the coming days, from me and from colleagues across the Perago team, is something more like the letter you write to someone you genuinely care about, who you’ve watched make the same avoidable mistakes for long enough that affection has started to mix with a little bit of impatience.

We care about Wales. Not in the abstract, flag-waving sense. We are based here, work here, live here. Our children go to Welsh schools. Our families use Welsh NHS services. When Welsh public services fail, it isn’t a policy problem we read about. It is a lived thing.

That is why this matters to us.

Wales goes to the polls on 7 May with a set of structural problems that are real, urgent and, crucially, not inevitable. The gap between what Welsh public services promise and what they actually deliver – on a Tuesday morning, in a school in Merthyr, in a GP surgery in Neath, at the end of a phone line in Swansea – is wide. Not because the people working inside those services aren’t trying. They are. It is wide because we keep designing policy in one room and delivery in another, and then expressing surprise when they don’t meet in the middle.

We have seen this up close. We have sat in those rooms. We have worked alongside the housing officers, the teachers, the civil servants, the NHS teams, who are carrying the weight of policy ambition on their shoulders while the infrastructure underneath them creaks. We have watched what happens when good intent collides with systems that weren’t built for the task they’ve been given. And we have, more often than we’d like, watched good people burn out trying to bridge a gap that should never have been as wide as it was.

So this is our contribution to the election conversation. Not a manifesto – it’s not about political promises. Not a critique, anyone can criticise from the outside. This is a series of pieces from people inside the Perago team who have been in the middle of the delivery challenge and have something specific to say about it.

Tim writes about council tax – 22 different versions of the same operation, running across Wales, serving one policy. It is one of the clearest illustrations in Welsh public life of what happens when systems designed in 1993 are asked to do the work of 2026. Emma writes about the 30,000 people in Welsh call centres who hold an extraordinary body of tacit knowledge about how Welsh services actually work – knowledge that is about to be automated away if we treat this as a cost problem rather than a knowhow problem. Omar makes the case for a Welsh Test, Learn and Grow programme, and why Wales – small, ambitious, with a single policy jurisdiction – is better placed than anywhere in the UK to build one. Chris writes about Welsh teachers spending their Sundays doing the administrative layer underneath a genuinely world-class curriculum, and what it would mean if the technology designed to help them was actually designed for them.

Different topics. The same underlying argument. Wales has extraordinary ambition. The delivery infrastructure has not kept pace with it. And the incoming government has a genuine, time-limited opportunity to close that gap – not by writing better policy, but by building the conditions for policy to actually reach the people it was made for.

We are not writing this as neutral observers. We have a stake in this. Perago exists because we believe Welsh public services can be better and that the work of making them better is worth doing. We have been doing it for nearly a decade, in partnership with Welsh Government, with NHS Wales, with local authorities, with schools, with communities. We know what progress looks like when it happens. We also know how often it doesn’t.

That is the spirit in which this series is written. Affectionate, because we mean it. Honest, because that is the only useful version of support. Specific, because vague encouragement helps no one.

The incoming Welsh Government will have a lot to deal with. It will inherit financial pressure, service backlogs, a workforce that has been stretched for years, and a public that has been promised transformation often enough to be understandably sceptical about it.

It will also inherit a country that is small enough to try things properly, ambitious enough to have already articulated a vision worth delivering, and full of people in public services who are still, despite everything, ready to be part of something better.

That is worth something. Perhaps even a love letter.

Dear Incoming Government is a Perago series published in the run-up to the May 2026 Senedd elections.