Writing on the Gwydir website (https://gwydir.wales/2020/10/09/welsh-labours-mates-rates-must-end/), Welsh Conservative Policy Director Darren Millar MS has pledged to scrap the Wales Union Learning Fund. He wrote:
“A Welsh Conservative Government would abolish the Wales Union Learning Fund, or WULF, as it is also known.
“Our motivation for doing this is simple. It’s time to end the handouts of hundreds of thousands of pounds every year to Labour’s mates in the trade union movement.
The article explains how during the life of the current Welsh Parliament the size of WULF has grown from £1,226,485.31 in 2016/17 to £1,652,916.12 in 2020/21.
Darren Millar comments on this growth:
“That’s an increase of almost half a million pounds – a growth rate of around a third – at the same time that the Welsh Labour-led Government has been starving front line health services and local authorities pretending it has no money to do anything.
“We need a general clean-up of how money flows to favoured charities and anointed organisations from the coffers of a Welsh Labour-led Government that continually pretends it doesn’t have money for anything and it’s all the fault of bogeymen in Westminster.
“The big bad WULF is one of the best examples of this.
“Without doubt there be consequences of the ending of the Wales Union Learning Fund. The biggest one will be that the trade unions will have a million and half pounds per year less to give back to the Wales Labour Party to fight elections. The political money laundering cycle will stop.”
The article also commits to invest the money saved by abolishing WULF into the education and skills system. Darren Millar writes:
“It is just the Wales Union Learning Fund that will be abolished. The money allocated to it will be used for other projects within the skills portfolio, so the amount of cash will not decrease.
“Under a Welsh Conservative Government, this funding would go directly to properly contracted training providers and Further Education colleges to boost their excellent work. Colleges would receive at least £1 million. That’s a pledge. The days of Further Education and vocational educational providers being the last in the queue for Welsh Government support, and always the first in the queue for Welsh Labour Government cuts, has to end.”
