Welsh Government Opens Commission to Weigh Independence for Wales

Wales now has a standing body charged with studying its constitutional future, and independence is one of the options it will weigh. The Plaid Cymru government announced the National Commission for Wales on Tuesday, November 10, and Constitution Minister Dafydd Trystan Davies said it would cost “in the ballpark” of 500,000 pounds a year, BBC News reported.

The government’s announcement gives the commission four jobs. It will advise on which powers Wales should seek next. The Welsh Government already wants the Crown Estate and rail infrastructure transferred from Westminster, along with justice and policing. It will hold a public conversation with people across Wales and carry out research. And it will “help inform future reform by considering the three viable options identified by the Independent Commission: enhanced devolution, a federal United Kingdom, and independence.”

That earlier body, the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales, reported in 2024 and concluded that independence was a viable option. The new commission is a standing advisory body rather than a time-limited inquiry, and the government says it will build on that work rather than repeat it.

Two co-chairs will lead it. Dame Menna Rawlings served as British ambassador to France and as High Commissioner to Australia. Professor Emyr Lewis is an emeritus professor at Aberystwyth University who works in constitutional law. “We’re not campaigners, we’re advisers,” Lewis told the BBC. No date has been set for a report.

“The way the United Kingdom is structured and governed is under increasing strain,” Davies said in the government’s statement. He said the constitutional development of Wales “should be shaped with people across Wales, not simply presented to them.”

Plaid Cymru promised the commission in its manifesto before the May election, in which it won 43 of the Senedd’s 96 seats and Rhun ap Iorwerth formed a minority government, as the Texian Partisan reported. The party has ruled out an independence referendum in this term, which runs to 2030. When Labour’s Huw Thomas asked in the Senedd on Tuesday whether that still held, Davies said it did.

The opposition benches split. Thomas gave the commission a cautious welcome and backed its look at moving powers to regional and local government. Welsh Conservative leader Darren Millar called it part of a “constitutional merry-go-round.” Reform UK’s Welsh leader, Helen Jenner, called it “ridiculous” and said voters “do not want to see Wales ripped out of the United Kingdom.”

Outside the chamber, Rob Hughes, chair of the independence campaign YesCymru, told BBC Radio Wales the commission was “one step forward” toward an independent Wales. He said YesCymru was looking at a referendum in 2032. Plaid has said that if it wins a second term, it may set out the case for independence in a white paper.