Plaid Cymru manifesto: Welsh party pledges universal childcare from the age of one

Entitled ‘Wales, It’s Us’, the manifesto also sets out plans to introduce a new £35 a week payment for every child in low-income families, which the party says would lift 50,000 children in Wales out of poverty.

Other key policies in Plaid Cymru’s manifesto include:

• Imposing statutory targets for reducing child poverty
• An extra £300 million a year for schools and colleges
• Using schools as family support hubs with multi-agency early intervention for vulnerable children and their families from birth
• Increasing funding for degree apprenticeships in Wales
• Introducing a legal ban on employers making a woman redundant throughout pregnancy, and until six months after return from maternity leave, other than in very limited circumstances
• Increasing the employee rate of National Insurance contributions for higher rate and additional rate taxpayers from 2 per cent to 4 per cent, raising an estimated £2bn a year
• Extending maternity and paternity pay and leave when babies are born prematurely (before 36 weeks’ gestation)

Plaid Cymru’s leader Adam Price said, ‘Decades of neglect from the Westminster parties, both Labour and Tories, have left us with a third of our children living in poverty. No more.

‘The solution to our problems in Wales is to take our future into our own hands. Because if we don’t believe we can change things then they never will.’

• The manifesto is available here