FUNDED CHILDCARE: Swansea families set to benefit as Welsh Government pumps £55m into expansion

Hundreds more two-year-olds across Wales will get funded childcare under a new cash injection — with Swansea already among the first areas to offer it.

Hundreds more families across Wales are in line for funded childcare after the Welsh Government announced a £55 million investment.

The money will speed up the rollout of 12.5 hours of funded childcare a week for all two-year-olds, delivered through councils including in Swansea.

Swansea was the second area in Wales to offer the scheme to every two-year-old, after Merthyr Tydfil, with Newport following soon after.

Wrexham has now joined that list, becoming the first North Wales authority to reach the milestone.

The £55m forms part of the Welsh Government’s First Supplementary Budget for 2026-27.

It includes £10m of capital funding to expand and improve childcare settings, aimed at boosting the quality and number of places available.

Ministers say the cash will help providers manage rising demand and stay afloat financially, while also supporting Welsh-medium childcare.

That ties into the long-standing target of reaching one million Welsh speakers by 2050.

The investment is a step towards the government’s wider promise of 20 hours of funded care a week for every child aged nine months to four years old.

At full rollout, ministers claim that offer will be the most generous anywhere in the UK.

Sioned Williams, the Plaid Cymru Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Minister for Social Justice and Equality, who holds the childcare brief, said the move showed the government was “accelerating our commitments to the families of Wales.”

“Childcare costs in Wales are the highest in the UK and I am determined to help families all over Wales, while also supporting children’s development,” she said.

She added that she was “particularly pleased” Wrexham was now expanding its offer, and that the government would keep working with councils to roll it out everywhere.

Research by Coram Family and Childcare last year found Wales had the highest holiday childcare costs of the British nations, lending weight to her claim.

A new expert steering group will advise on the next stages of the rollout, focusing on training enough staff, digital applications and improving access for families.

The funding lands just days after the policy behind it caused chaos in the Senedd.

Reform UK tabled a debate on 11 June demanding the new Plaid government publish full costings and a timetable for its childcare offer within its first 100 days.

But the motion was amended to point out that Reform’s own election manifesto contained no childcare commitments — and in a tangle that drew mockery, 11 Reform members ended up voting for the amended motion attacking their own party.

Reform has claimed the full childcare offer could cost between £388m and £710m a year, well above the roughly £400m figure Plaid has cited.

The latest announcement also marks a change of guard, with funded childcare milestones celebrated earlier this year by the then Labour government’s children’s minister, Dawn Bowden.

Welsh Labour lost power to Plaid Cymru at May’s Senedd election and now sits in opposition.

The party gave the funding a cautious welcome.

Lynne Neagle, Welsh Labour’s spokesperson for children, education and lifelong learning, welcomed the news that Wrexham would offer free childcare to all two-year-olds, and said she hoped more councils would follow.

She said the previous Welsh Labour government had worked to expand Flying Start provision across Wales, and that it was “great to see the government commit to our manifesto pledge and continue this work.”

But she said questions remained. “We await further information on the government’s supplementary budget, but as it stands there are still many unanswered questions around the funding commitments,” she said.

Flying Start is the Welsh Government’s flagship early-years programme, offering childcare, parenting support and health visiting to families with young children.

Funded childcare for two-year-olds is being expanded in phases, with the latest cash intended to widen access ahead of the next academic year.

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SENEDD: Local Reform members split in childcare row — and Plaid’s flagship policy ‘could cost £710m’

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.

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