Bigger Senedd is 'value for money': Five takeaways from Eluned Morgan's phone-in

First Minister Eluned Morgan was the third party leader to appear on The Phone-In on BBC Radio Wales, with the Senedd election now just 11 weeks away.

The Welsh Labour leader was quizzed by listeners and presenter Jason Mohammad over issues like the state of the NHS, to more politicians in Cardiff Bay, to whether north Wales doesn't get its fair share of funding.

And she admitted being driven mad by problems ringing for a GP appointment first thing in the morning.

So what did we learn?

The first minister stressed that a "huge amount of money" had been spent on "bringing those waiting lists down" - with the average wait for treatment across Wales at 19 weeks and "a little bit higher" in north Wales at 21 weeks.

"Things are getting better," Morgan said, arguing that Wales is behind England on waits because "we came out of the pandemic slower, and people were really keen for us to do that - they voted for us in big numbers at the last election but there was a knock-on effect".

Now a Labour UK government is providing extra money to turn things around, she said.

Caller Carl in Cefn Mawr, who said he had voted Labour all his life but is not planning to so in May, was less than convinced.

He summed up Morgan's general position as "the same excuse Welsh Labour's been putting for 14 years - 'it's the Tory government holding us back'".

A record monthly drop in the number of patients waiting for treatment was reported in January - a fall of 23,400 to just under 757,900 waiting in November.

There was also a reduction in the number of people waiting two years for treatment.

But only just under two thirds of patients, 64.3%, were spending less than four hours in A&E before being admitted, transferred or discharged.

That's the lowest in three years but well short of a 95% target that has never been met.

One listener later raised the trouble some people had in calling their local GP surgery for an 08:00 appointment, saying "it does not work".

Morgan sympathised and said it "drives us all mad."

"We have tried to change GP contracts to make it easier, to make sure that there are alternative methods for people to get appointments," she said.

"I'm a big fan of online appointments and online consultations."

She said she recommended using the NHS App to get through to surgeries, saying it "is in their [GPs] contracts that they have to use it now".

Several callers raised the fact that Wales will be electing 96 members to the Welsh Parliament in May, up from the current 60.

The general question seemed to be "is this the best use of public money?".

The first minister agreed that the £10m a year extra cost appeared to be a big sum, but she said it was "a tiny, tiny amount" compared to the Welsh government's £27bn budget.

"The key thing is it makes us as a government perform better," she said.

"You get more and better value for money from us if we are scrutinised. There is plenty of evidence to support that."

On whether the increase in MSs was backed by the public, Morgan said it was in both Welsh Labour's and Plaid Cymru's manifestos at the last Senedd election - and people voted to "deliver that, so we were given a mandate".

If recent polls are to be believed, Morgan and Welsh Labour have a real fight on their hands not just to be in government but also to be the main opposition party in Wales.

Morgan repeated her argument that she offered voters "stability" against what was on offer from Plaid Cymru and Reform.

Morgan also knocked backed calls for Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to resign over his handling of the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Last week she backed Sir Keir after Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said he should go, and told the phone-in that the prime minister offered stability in a "world that's a difficult and sensitive space".

Morgan said she had a good relationship with the prime minister, but added that she will always be "asking him for more".

One caller complained that the first minister was favouring south Wales over north Wales, asking her: "Where does all the money go? It always goes to south Wales."

The caller claimed Morgan was happy to spend money on "vanity projects" like the planned £205.2m subsidy of Cardiff Airport .

Morgan said north Wales was going to get an artificial intelligence (AI) growth zone and would benefit from "one of the biggest investments ever seen" in the nuclear plant at Wylfa, on Anglesey, where one of the UK's first three small modular reactors (SMRs) will be built and see the creation of thousands of jobs.

"That's going to be transformational for the economy of north Wales," Morgan said.

She also cited "massive investment" for rail, the NHS, universities and also for tackling potholes.

"That's been a big issue for me when I was up there and listening to people on what they wanted me to do – and we're filling them," she said.

Julia in Swansea said she wanted the "very, very rich" to pay a "wealth tax" saying there were more than 170 billionaires in the UK with "five or six" of them living in Wales.

"The NHS is starved, education system is starved, people are poor, pensioners are freezing," she said.

"So why not take the money from the people who've got it, because they don't need it."

Morgan replied that "part of the issue in Wales is that we don't have enough people earning a huge amount of money" adding that the amount you could get from them is "very very small".

However, she said she "heard people's frustrations when they looked at the super-rich".

The Radio Wales Phone-In has invited each of the Welsh party leaders or representatives on to the programme over six weeks.

In March, BBC Wales is holding a live debate in Wrexham with a panel of politicians ahead of the Senedd election. Click here to apply to be in the audience.