Five new Welsh stations could get Westminster money
Wales's railway minister says he is waiting to see if funding to build five stations around Cardiff and Newport will be confirmed in Westminster next week.Transport secretary Ken Skates said the Welsh government had tried to persuade the UK government to pay for the work.He told Senedd members to wait for Chancellor Rachel Reeves's spending review on June 11.Meanwhile the first minister has said it is likely that the announcement of billions in transport funding in England will trigger extra money for Wales, but said she did not know how much it may be.
The comments follow complaints from all parties that Wales has missed out on funding for major rail projects.Labour was criticised by opponents on Tuesday in a row about the East West rail line between Oxford and Cambridge.As with HS2, the way the line is classified under the rules of devolution means Wales will not receive any extra funding.Rail is not fully devolved, so decisions about funding new infrastructure are taken in Westminster.
Proposals for new stations in south-east Wales emerged after the planned M4 relief road was scrapped.The Burns Commission into improving transport in the region said trains should stop at Cardiff East, Newport West, Somerton, Llanwern, and a station for the communities of Magor and Undy.Skates said there was a "solid business case" for the stations, adding: "We now want to work with UK government to move to construction.""There is strong support both here and at Westminster for the five new stations," he said."I don't believe we could have done any more to influence UK Treasury so we now await the comprehensive spending review next week."The Welsh government is also thought to be pushing for investment in north Wales including improvements at Padeswood and just over the border in Chester – vital for improving services on this side of the border.
On Wednesday billions of investment in trains, trams and bus schemes in England were announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves.Skates told the Senedd on Tuesday that it was "the equivalent, for England, of our local transport grants".Speaking to BBC Wales on Wednesday, Eluned Morgan said that the announcement will likely trigger extra spending through the formula that funds Welsh public services."There is likely to be consequential money as a result of the announcement today," she said.Asked how much it might amount to, she added: "I don't know the detail of that."Morgan made the comment at a photo-opportunity with Angela Rayner at a Welsh cake shop in Cardiff, held to promote April's rise in the minimum wage. Rayner did not give interviews to the press gathered there, turning down a request from BBC Wales as she left.Rayner was in Cardiff meeting Welsh ministers on Wednesday.Plaid Cymru's Peredur Owen Griffiths said Wales was "forgotten" in Wednesday's announcement and said any consequential funding "will be worlds away from making up for the billions of pounds we've been deprived of over the years"."Their supposed "partnership in power" serves no purpose and the people of Wales deserves better," he said.Additional reporting by Gareth Lewis
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Wales Online
4 hours ago
- Wales Online
The £6bn rail line argument that masks what you should be really angry about
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info Over the last few days, there has been one hot topic in the world of Welsh politics - a train line which will run between Oxford and Cambridge. Given these two cities are roughly 200 miles from Wales, you can be forgiven for asking why. East West Rail is a railway project which will link Oxford and Cambridge at an estimated cost of £6.6bn. Any money spent on it will trigger extra payments to Scotland and Northern Ireland so they can spend it on their transport systems. But, just as has been the case throughout the HS2 debacle, there won't be any extra money for the Welsh Government. The reason for this is both incredibly simple and reasonable on the surface but devillishly complicated and truly unfair beneath it. It may not necessarily be a scandal in itself. But it symbolises everything that is wrong with how rail funding is allocated in England and Wales. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here On the face of it, this issue isn't linked to the spending review that has been happening in Westminster for the last six months or more and of which chancellor Rachel Reeves will stand up in the Commons on Wednesday and deliver the conclusion. Yet it helps shed a light on why that will be enormously complex to understand and why the real story may not be the one you read in headlines that evening. So bear with us while we go through it. The fury from politicians Opposition politicians in Wales have been fulminating about East West rail. They say that the rail line should have been classified as an England-only project like Crossrail so that the Welsh Government would get a guaranteed share. Lib Dem MP David Chadwick said Wales will lose out to the tune of between £306m and £363m as a result. Describing it as another HS2, he said: "Labour expects people across Wales to believe the ridiculous idea that this project will benefit them, and they are justified in not giving Wales the money it needs to improve our own public transport systems. 'It's a disgrace, and it shows there has been no meaningful change since in the way Wales is treated since Labour took power compared to the Conservatives." Plaid Cymru's leader Mr ap Iorwerth took a similar tack, telling plenary: "For all the talk of the UK Government acknowledging somehow that Welsh rail has been historically underfunded, this is some partnership in power." Yet, while there's a lot of truth to what they're saying, it's also much more complicated. Which is where the spending review comes in. Comparability factors There will be so many numbers in the paperwork that accompanies Wednesday's spending review that finding the most important ones isn't straightforward. Yet if you want to know just how much of the England and Wales transport pot is going to be sucked into paying for massive rail projects in England like HS2 (£66bn) or East West rail (£6bn) or all the tram/train projects being promised in England outside London (£15bn), then look out for the overall transport comparability factor for Wales. Very simply, this is the number that the Treasury uses to work out how much the Welsh Government should get for every £1 it spends on transport in England. The reason everyone has been so, so angry about HS2 and the massive billions being poured is that back in 2015, Wales used to get a comparability factor of 80.9%. Yet when the number crunchers in Horse Guards Road sat down to work out how much the Welsh Government should get at the last spending review in 2021, that comparability factor fell to just 33.5%. Ouch. For every £1 spent on transport by Westminster, since the last spending review the Welsh Government has received a population adjusted share (5%) of 33.5%. Or about 1.6p. For context, it used to be around 4p. If Mr Chadwick and Mr Iorwerth are right and the UK government plans to plough even more money into rail in England in the coming years on projects like HS2, East Coast and what the Tories used to call Northern Powerhouse rail, then the new comparability factor that the Treasury mathematicians will conjure up this time could be even lower. But even that is massively misleading. Because if the UK government also promises to plough vast sums into rail in Wales then the comparability factor for the Welsh Government would not rise - it would fall further still. Is your mind boggling yet? We said it was complex. What the Welsh Government wants Because the Welsh Government isn't responsible for rail infrastructure spending, the transport comparability factor really just reflects how much money is going on rail. The less that's spent on rail, the higher a share of the overall transport pot the Welsh Government gets. The more that goes on rail, the lower a share of the overall transport spot the Welsh Government gets. The real problem for Cardiff Bay then is not the comparability factor. Neither is it the fact that East West rail isn't classified as England-only. The problem, as far as the Welsh Government is concerned, is the fact that the England and Wales rail pot itself isn't shared fairly. HS2 and East Coast rail are the symbols of a system that is broken that pours vast sums into English rail projects while Wales misses out. Even if they were classified as England-only, the money would go to the Welsh Government which isn't responsible for rail infrastructure spending. "The way that the system operates at the moment—for years I've been saying—is redundant," Wales' transport minister Ken Skates has said. "The east-west line, which has been in development, I believe, for around about 20 years now, is part of the rail network enhancements pipeline, where everything in a large footprint, a substantial footprint, including Wales, is packaged together. "Where you have all schemes in England and Wales packaged together in what's called the regional network enhancement pipeline it means that projects in Wales are always going to be competing on the business case with projects in affluent areas of the south-east, of London. That means that we are at a disadvantage. "I want to see it change. I've been saying it for years. There's nothing new in this story. I've been saying that we need reform for years and suddenly people have woken up to it." Wales' First Minister Eluned Morgan has said the same. "What we have is a situation where there is a pipeline of projects for England and Wales. Are we getting our fair share? Absolutely not. Are we making the case? Absolutely." "I've made the case very, very clearly that, when it comes to rail, we have been short-changed, and I do hope that we will get some movement on that in the next week from the spending review," she said. What does this mean for the spending review When Rachel Reeves stands up in the Commons on Wednesday, we fully expect she will announce some funding for rail in Wales, as you can see in our piece here, and our expectation is that will be about the rail stations earmarked in the work by Lord Burns after the M4 relief road was axed. They would be in Cardiff East, Parkway, Newport West, Maindy, Llanwern and Magor. But what matters is how much and when - and how that compares to the money being spent in England. Imagine the chancellor announces a few hundred million pounds for those rail stations in Wales in the spending review, what we do not - and will likely not know for many years - is whether that amount is a fair reflection of the mass spending she has announced in England because we know she has also touted £15bn of improvements in England. It will likely take years for academics to assess what kind of share of the rail pot has been spent in Wales. In the past, it certainly has not been fair. In 2018, a Welsh Government commissioned report by Professor Mark Barry estimated that the Network Rail Wales route, which covers 11% of the UK network, received just over 1% of the enhancement budget for the 2011-2016 period. In 2021, the Wales Governance Centre told MPs on the Welsh affairs select committee that had rail been fully devolved to the Welsh Government, Wales would have received an additional £514m for enhancements via Network Rail had rail infrastructure been devolved as it is in Scotland. So when Leeds West and Pudsey MP Ms Reeves gets to her feet in the Commons on Wednesday, you can pretty much guarantee there will at least one or two headlines relevant Wales. But we may not understand what they really mean for a while yet and East West rail won't help us understand either.
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Starmer goes all in on NHS with PM set to hand health service £30bn spending boost at expense of other public services
Sir Keir Starmer will pump money into the NHS at the expense of other public services. The government is putting all its eggs in one basket as it lines up the Department for Health for a £30billion cash boost at next week's spending review. However, health chiefs have warned the prime minister's promise to 'turbocharge delivery' could lead to difficult compromises elsewhere in services from the police to councils. It comes after the party's unexpected victory in the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse by-election - though as the threat of Nigel Farage 's Reform UK still looms large. The Department for Health will be handed an increase of around £200billion to its budget by 2028 - a £17billion rise in real terms. Its day-to-day budget is set to increase by 2.8 per cent in real terms annually over the three-year spending review period. Sir Keir has also pledged to have 92 per cent of NHS patients treated within 18 weeks by the next election, a target that has remained unmet for a decade. Currently, under 60 per cent are seen within this time with waiting lists rising to 7.4million last month. There are even fears NHS bosses may not hit an interim goal of 65 per cent next year. Chancellor Rachel Reeves' prioritisation of health has forced cuts in other departments and prompted protestations from other cabinet members like Yvette Cooper, the home secretary and Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary. Both have warned Ms Reeves the cuts will put some of the government's crime and housing targets at risk amid 'robust negotiations'. But the chancellor has maintained 'not every department will get everything they want'. Overall, the health budget, which stood at £178billion as Labour took office, will exceed £230billion by the next election. The increase means health is set to account for 41 per cent of all day-to-day departmental spending - up from 39 per cent. Ben Zaranko, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said Ms Reeves's cash boost was 'a serious, meaningful increase in health funding'. But Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, warned the funding increase 'is not going to enable us to achieve recovery and reform' without big changes to the way the health service treats patients. He said the government's plan to withhold the budget for infrastructure simultaneously would also make 'combining recovery and reform' impossible.
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Lawyers warned to stop using ChatGPT to argue lawsuits after AI programs 'made up fictitious cases'
Lawyers in England and Wales have been warned they could face 'severe sanctions' including potential criminal prosecution if they present false material generated by AI in court. The ruling, by one of Britain's most senior judges, comes on the back of a string of cases in which which artificially intelligence software has produced fictitious legal cases and completely invented quotes. The first case saw AI fabricate 'inaccurate and fictitious' material in a lawsuit brought against two banks, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, the second involved a lawyer for a man suing his local council who was unable to explain the origin of the nonexistent precedents in his legal argument. While large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI 's ChatGPT and Google 's Gemini are capable of producing long accurate-sounding texts, they are technically only focused on producing a 'statistically plausible' reply. The programs are also prone to what researchers call 'hallucinations' - outputs that are misleading or lack any factual basis. AI Agent and Assistance platform Vectera has monitored the accuracy of AI chatbots since 2023 and found that the top programs hallucinate between 0.7 per cent and 2.2 per cent of the time - with others dramatically higher. However, those figures become astronomically higher when the chatbots are prompted to produce longer texts from scratch, with market leader OpenAI recently acknowledging that its flagship ChatGPT system hallucinates between 51 per cent and 79 per cent of the time if asked open-ended questions. While large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are capable of producing long accurate-sounding texts, they are technically only focused on producing a 'statistically plausible' reply - which can lead to them 'hallucinating' false information Dame Victoria Sharp, president of the King's Bench Division of the High Court, and Justice Jeremy Johnson KC, authored the new ruling. In it they say: 'The referrals arise out of the actual or suspected use by lawyers of generative artificial intelligence tools to produce written legal arguments or witness statements which are not then checked, so that false information (typically a fake citation or quotation) is put before the court. 'The facts of these cases raise concerns about the competence and conduct of the individual lawyers who have been referred to this court. 'They raise broader areas of concern however as to the adequacy of the training, supervision and regulation of those who practice before the courts, and as to the practical steps taken by those with responsibilities in those areas to ensure that lawyers who conduct litigation understand and comply with their professional and ethical responsibilities and their duties to the court.' The pair argued that existing guidance around AI was 'insufficient to address the misuse of artificial intelligence'. Judge Sharp wrote: 'There are serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the justice system if artificial intelligence is misused,' While acknowledging that AI remained a 'powerful technology' with legitimate use cases, she nevertheless reiterated that the technology brought 'risks as well as opportunities.' In the first case cited in the judgment, a British man sought millions in damages from two banks. The court discovered that 18 out of 45 citations included in the legal arguments featured past cases that simply did not exist. Even in instances in which the cases did exist, often the quotations were inaccurate or did not support the legal argument being presented. The second case, which dates to May 2023, involved a man who was turned down for emergency accommodation from the local authority and ultimately became homeless. His legal team cited five past cases, which the opposing lawyers discovered simply did not exist - tipped off by the fact by the US spellings and formulaic prose style. Rapid improvements in AI systems means its use is becoming a global issue in the field of law, as the judicial sector figures out how to incorporate artificial intelligence into what is frequently a very traditional, rules-bound work environment. Earlier this year a New York lawyer faced disciplinary proceedings after being caught using ChatGPT for research and citing a none-existent case in a medical malpractice lawsuit. Attorney Jae Lee was referred to the grievance panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in February 2025 after she cited a fabricated case about a Queens doctor botching an abortion in an appeal to revive her client's lawsuit. The case did not exist and had been conjured up by OpenAI's ChatGPT and the case was dismissed. The court ordered Lee to submit a copy of the cited decision after it was not able to find the case. She responded that she was 'unable to furnish a copy of the decision.' Lee said she had included a case 'suggested' by ChatGPT but that there was 'no bad faith, willfulness, or prejudice towards the opposing party or the judicial system' in doing so. The conduct 'falls well below the basic obligations of counsel,' a three-judge panel for the Manhattan-based appeals court wrote. In June two New York lawyers were fined $5,000 after they relied on fake research created by ChatGPT for a submission in an injury claim against Avianca airline. Judge Kevin Castel said attorneys Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca acted in bad faith by using the AI bot's submissions - some of which contained 'gibberish' - even after judicial orders questioned their authenticity.
