Wales is a constituent part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the UK. The UK is the political union between England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and is a constitutional monarchy. For information on the development of the United Kingdom, see the parallel article for England.
Devolution in Wales
Wales has a devolved government. Its development is summarised below.
A referendum on a proposal to create a Welsh Assembly with devolved powers was held in 1979 and was defeated by a large majority.
A second referendum was held on 18 September 1997 and resulted in a narrow majority in favour. This result led to the UK Parliament passing the Government of Wales Act 1998. Under the Act, a National Assembly was established as a corporate body, with the executive (the Government) and the legislature (the Assembly itself) operating as one. The Act limited the National Assembly to the making of secondary legislation when authorised by the UK Parliament. These powers were broadly equivalent to those previously held by the Secretary of State for Wales in the UK Parliament. The first elections to the new institution were held on 6 May 1999.
In 2004, the Richard Commission, established by the First Minister of the National Assembly for Wales in 2002 to examine the powers and electoral arrangements of the Assembly, recommended the separation of the executive and legislature as individual legal entities. The Government of Wales Act 2006 subsequently replaced the corporate body with a new National Assembly for Wales and a separate executive, the Welsh Assembly Government, made up of ministers who are members of, and accountable to, the Assembly.
The 2006 Act also enabled the National Assembly to gain further powers in devolved areas gradually and on an individual basis. Following a referendum held on 3 March 2011, in which the Welsh electorate voted in favour of further powers, the Assembly approved an order to bring new powers into force from 5 May 2011.
Although the statutory name for the executive remains the Welsh Assembly Government, since May 2011 it has been known simply as the Welsh Government.
Under the Wales Act 2014, the Welsh Government has devolved powers to make primary legislation imposing taxes to the Welsh Government. The Act also extended its borrowing powers.
The Wales Act 2017 set out amendments to the Government of Wales Act 2006, devolving further legislative powers to Wales and changing the devolution model from a ‘conferred matters’ model to a ‘reserved matters’ model. The shift towards a devolution settlement based on reserved matters, rather than conferred matters, means that the Welsh devolution settlement is more similar to those in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Further information is available from the National Assembly pages on the history of devolution in Wales and from the UK Government’s policy pages on Welsh devolution.
EU Membership
At the time of writing, January 2019, the United Kingdom (UK), rather than Wales (as one of its four constituent parts), is a member state of the European Union (EU). For a history of the UK’s membership of the EU, see the article ‘Historical Development’ for England.
Brexit
On 23 June 2016 a referendum on UK membership of the European Union was held. The people of the UK as a whole voted with a majority of 51.9% to leave the EU, with 52.5% of voters in Wales opting to leave. For further information on the process of the UK leaving the EU, see the parallel article for England.
Article last reviewed December 2020.