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🧵With the Senedd election just over a week away, we’ve been digging through the manifestos. We’ve put them to the test against the recommendations in our report, "Transforming Public Services for a Modern Wales" — our manual for a 21st-century state.

The big question: Who is actually ready to fix the "digital plumbing" of the Welsh state, and who is just offering more "digital wallpaper"? Our report argues for funding persistent teams over projects and building shared infrastructure. Let's see how the parties stack up.

We're seeing a lot of "AI hype." While AI is a tool, it's not a silver bullet. If you bolt it onto a broken, manual process, you just get an expensive, broken process. We need to focus on the unsexy stuff—identity, payments, and shared data.

There's a great consensus on procurement! Almost all parties want to use gov spending to support local Welsh SMEs. This is a huge win for a sovereign tech economy.

We’re also seeing big promises on transparency and data portals. Our report calls for "working in the open," but this data must be used to fundamentally redesign services around user needs — focusing on outcomes for the public rather than just monitoring outputs.

But we’re worried about state capacity. You can’t transform a modern state while cutting the civil service and freezing pay for the very digital specialists we need to recruit. Transformation requires people, not just platforms.

From Plaid’s "test and learn" plans to Labour’s new Minister for Digital, there are sparks of hope—but the "holistic" side of digital (culture, delivery models, agile) still feels like it’s in the back seat.