Drakeford Says Consider Scrapping Wales Office; Labour Colleagues Disagree

Former Labour First Minister Mark Drakeford has said the time has come to consider scrapping the Wales Office.

He was asked on S4C's Y Byd yn ei Le whether he would be happy to get rid of the UK government department. "Yes, I think the time has come for us to think about that", he replied, according to BBC News. He said former Labour prime minister Tony Blair had also considered abolition, and the idea had been discussed at Westminster for more than a decade. Westminster's arrangements need to change, he added, as reported by Nation.Cymru. His comments were published on 9 October 2026.

Labour MP Ruth Jones said the suggestion was "foolish". Speaking on BBC Radio Wales Breakfast on Friday 9 October, she defended the department and its minister.

She said Welsh Secretary Stephen Kinnock is fighting the corner for Wales as the only person from Wales at the UK cabinet table. She said Drakeford is now retired and elected politicians should be left to get on with the job.

Her defence echoed the line taken by then First Minister Eluned Morgan earlier this year. Morgan leads the Welsh government in Cardiff. She said there remained a role for the Welsh secretary. She said the post should be the voice of Wales at the cabinet table, rather than the UK government's voice in Wales.

The post of Secretary of State for Wales was created by Harold Wilson's Labour government in October 1964. The Welsh Office opened in the April that followed. It lost most of its powers when devolution began in 1999. Devolution is the system that moved control over domestic policy from London to Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast.

In that year, powers over health, education, environment, agriculture and transport in Wales were taken over by the Welsh Assembly, now known as the Senedd, the Welsh parliament. What was left of the UK government department became the Wales Office. The job has been reshaped before. Peter Hain held cabinet responsibility for Wales and Northern Ireland together between 2005 and 2007.

The broader context here will be familiar to devolution watchers. The territorial offices lost their executive functions a quarter of a century ago. What they have left is access — a seat at Cabinet, a Whitehall base, and a lever for talks between London and Cardiff. Drakeford's argument asks whether that still buys enough.

For Labour watchers, the exchange matters because it pits a former First Minister, free to float changes to Whitehall departments, against serving ministers who must work with the system as it is. Jones put Kinnock's value in representational terms, the Welsh voice in the room. Morgan made much the same point earlier, but with a sharper point about who the secretary serves. The practical question is less whether the Wales Office runs much — it does not — than whether Whitehall would listen differently without a dedicated Secretary of State.