Only 9% of People Trust Politicians to Tell the Truth. Wales Is Trying to Change That.
Nine percent. That is the proportion of the British public that currently trusts elected politicians to tell the truth. It is a historic low, recorded after four decades of monitoring, and it sits at the heart of everything the Welsh Senedd is attempting to do with a piece of legislation that is, without much exaggeration, unlike anything tried anywhere else in the world.
The Senedd Cymru (Member Accountability and Elections) Bill, currently in its final legislative stages and due to complete its Stage 3 proceedings on March 17, 2026, is colloquially known as the “lying politicians bill.” That description is accurate as far as it goes, but the full picture is more considered, more carefully constructed, and more constitutionally ambitious than a tabloid shorthand suggests. Wales is not simply trying to punish politicians for fibbing. It is attempting to rebuild the basic social contract between the electorate and the people they send to represent them, using law rather than convention to do it.
How It Got to This Point
The trust collapse that prompted this legislation did not happen overnight. It is the product of decades of spin, broken promises, and the industrialisation of misinformation that social media has enabled. Seventy-three percent of Welsh voters now support the criminalisation of politicians who lie. Forty-five percent believe the government almost never puts the country ahead of its own interests. These are not the numbers of a mildly dissatisfied electorate. They are the numbers of people who have largely stopped believing the system works honestly.
The legislative journey began with the Elections and Elected Bodies (Wales) Bill in 2023, which received Royal Assent in September 2024. That bill reformed electoral administration but lacked meaningful sanctions for deception. An amendment proposed by Adam Price MS to disqualify members found guilty of wilful deceit was withdrawn at the final stage, but only after the Welsh Government made a formal commitment to bring dedicated legislation forward before 2026. That commitment produced the current bill.
The Senedd’s own Code of Conduct is already the only one in the United Kingdom that specifically requires members to act truthfully. This bill is the attempt to give that requirement genuine consequences.
What the Bill Actually Does
The legislation works on several levels simultaneously, and it is worth understanding each of them clearly.
The most significant element is the creation of a new offence of deliberate deception, specifically targeted at statements made during election campaigns. To be found guilty, it must be proven that a candidate knowingly published a statement of fact they knew to be false or deceptive, with the intent to mislead. This is a deliberately high bar. Honest mistakes are protected. Contested statistics used in good faith are protected. Opinions and beliefs are protected. The law is aimed specifically at deliberate, knowing dishonesty.
Importantly, the bill does not immediately create this offence. It gives Welsh Ministers the power to do so through secondary legislation, which has drawn criticism from some quarters who argue that defining a criminal offence with less parliamentary scrutiny than usual is a significant delegation of power. Transparency International UK has described it as a potential blank cheque for the executive. It is a legitimate concern, and one the Senedd will need to address carefully in the regulations that follow.
There is also a 14-day correction window built into the framework. If a politician is notified that a statement they made is considered false, they can avoid disqualification by retracting it, apologising, and issuing a correction within two weeks. This is a sensible provision. The goal is honest politics, not a legal minefield designed to catch people out.
A New Way to Remove an MS
The bill also introduces a recall system, giving voters a formal mechanism to remove a Member of the Senedd between elections. Two things can trigger a recall: a criminal conviction resulting in a custodial sentence (for sentences under 12 months, since longer sentences already trigger automatic disqualification), or a recommendation from the Senedd’s Standards of Conduct Committee following a serious breach of the Code of Conduct.
Because the Senedd is moving to a closed-list proportional representation system from May 2026, a traditional by-election is not possible when a seat becomes vacant. Instead, the bill establishes a retain or remove ballot. Voters are asked a single question: do you want to keep this MS or remove them? If removal wins, the seat passes to the next eligible candidate on the party’s list from the previous election.
The Electoral Reform Society has criticised this model on the grounds that it prevents voters from punishing the party, since the seat stays with the same party regardless of the outcome. It is a fair point, and one of several places where the mechanics of proportional representation create complications that the Westminster recall system does not face. The Senedd is navigating genuinely new constitutional territory here.
Keeping Politicians from Marking Their Own Homework
A running concern throughout the bill’s development has been the risk of politicians investigating themselves. The legislation addresses this by requiring independent lay members to sit on the Standards of Conduct Committee for the first time, permanently barring anyone who has previously served as an MS, MP, MSP, or MLA from taking those roles. The Senedd Commissioner for Standards also gains expanded powers to launch investigations on their own initiative, without waiting for a formal complaint. This proactive model already exists in the Northern Ireland Assembly and the House of Commons, and its introduction in Wales is a straightforward improvement.
The Complications
None of this is without genuine legal difficulty. Parliamentary privilege, enshrined in Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689, protects freedom of speech in Parliament from being questioned in any court. The bill focuses primarily on statements made during election campaigns rather than in the Senedd chamber, which reduces but does not eliminate the tension. If a politician repeats a campaign claim on the Senedd floor, the interaction between criminal law and parliamentary privilege becomes legally uncertain.
There is also a reasonable concern about a chilling effect on political debate. If politicians fear that a forceful interpretation of economic data could be judged criminally false, some may retreat into cautious vagueness on complex issues. The bill’s authors are aware of this risk, which is why the intent threshold is set as high as it is, but it remains a tension that will only be resolved in practice.
And then there is timing. The convention that electoral law should not be changed within six months of an election means that most of the bill’s provisions will not be operational for the May 2026 Senedd elections. The full offence of deliberate deception and the working recall system are likely to be in place for the 2030 election cycle at the earliest. The bill’s impact, in other words, will not be felt immediately.
The Political Context
The bill is being debated against a backdrop of significant political realignment in Wales. A YouGov poll from January 2026 placed Plaid Cymru, the bill’s primary advocate, at 37% of the vote. Reform UK sits at 23%. Labour and the Conservatives, the two parties that have dominated Welsh politics for generations, are both at 10%. Whatever one makes of those specific numbers, they reflect a Welsh electorate that is actively looking for something different, and finding it in parties positioned at opposite ends of the democratic reform spectrum.
Plaid Cymru’s surge in particular suggests that championing political integrity has become an electorally viable position in Wales in a way it has not been elsewhere in the UK. That is, in itself, a significant data point.
A Cautious but Genuine Step Forward
Wales is not going to solve the crisis of democratic trust with a single piece of legislation. The bill has real weaknesses, most notably the delegation of criminal offence definitions to secondary legislation and the limitations of the recall system under proportional representation. These are not minor quibbles; they are structural issues that the Senedd will need to address with care and transparency in the regulations that follow.
But the underlying ambition is sound. The move from voluntary honour to statutory accountability, from trusting politicians to police themselves to giving independent bodies and ultimately voters the tools to act, reflects a serious attempt to respond to a serious problem. The 9% figure is not just a polling statistic. It is a measure of how far the relationship between the public and their representatives has deteriorated. Wales is at least trying to do something about it.
Whether it becomes a global model or a cautionary tale will depend almost entirely on how the details are handled from here.
