Written Statement: Pilot Candidate Diversity Grant Funding Awarded

Section 27 of the Elections and Elected Bodies (Wales) Act 2024 requires Welsh Ministers to make arrangements for the provision of services to support candidates with protected characteristics that are under-represented in the Senedd and local government. 

In autumn 2025, we launched a pilot Candidate Diversity Grant to make £400,000 available over two years, to support third sector, and not-for-profit organisations working in Wales provide services supporting those typically under-represented in our democratic institutions. 

We are pleased to announce that the Welsh Government is awarding funding to three organisations under this pilot grant scheme: 

• Elect Her, who will be running a programme supporting women;
• Race Equality First, who will provide services for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) individuals;
• Shout Out UK, who will be co-designing a Candidate Resilience Guide to address the barrier of rising abuse and intimidation faced by those in public life, which disproportionately deters candidates with protected characteristics that are currently underrepresented. 

These organisations will be providing services to support candidates at the 2026 Senedd election and the 2027 local government elections. 

As this is a pilot, one of our key aims is to test the effectiveness of such services and to learn more about how they can help to encourage more persons from underrepresented groups to stand. These findings will be used to inform a longer programme of work on increasing the diversity of democratic institutions in Wales.

There is currently limited data available on the diversity of candidates and elected members of democratic institutions in Wales, making it difficult to establish accurate information on which specific groups are currently underrepresented. However, what data is available provides evidence that women and BAME individuals are currently underrepresented in our institutions:

• The 2022 Local Government Candidates Survey showed that 40% of elected County Councillors surveyed were female and that 96% of elected County and Community Councillors reported they were from a white ethnic group. 
• According to the Senedd Research Service’s report Election 2021: How diverse is the Sixth Senedd?, at the last Senedd election 43% of elected Senedd Members were women, while only 5% of elected Members came from an ethnic minority background. 
• These reports also suggest that LGBTQ+ and disabled groups may also be underrepresented, although more data is needed to fully understand this. Our Research Into The Socio-Economic Influences Of Democratic Participation also highlighted that there are barriers to standing for elected office for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. 

By comparison, according to the 2021 Census, women made up 51.1% of the population of Wales and 93.8% of the population identified as being from a white ethnic group. In addition, 3% of the population identified as LGBT+, while 7.6% opted not to answer about their sexual orientation. 21.1% of the population of Wales were disabled.

We are considering how we can fill the gaps in the data to ensure we have an accurate picture of who is choosing or not choosing to stand for elected office at the various stages of the candidate pipeline and to allow us to take action accordingly where any underrepresentation occurs. This will include efforts to increase the response rate for the Local Government Candidate Survey from 12% in 2022, for which the Senedd’s Local Government and Housing Committee’s Diversity in Local Government report (October 2023) gave helpful suggestions. 

This grant scheme forms part of broader efforts to make our democratic institutions in Wales more representative of the diversity of the population. In March 2025, we published diversity and inclusion guidance for political parties in Wales, which encourages political parties to develop and publish diversity and inclusion strategies, outlining how they intend to help increase the representation of certain groups in Welsh elections. We would encourage political parties to work with the organisations being funded under this grant scheme as they take steps to implement the Welsh Government’s diversity and inclusion guidance.

The Welsh Government is committed to increasing diversity across all aspects of public life and to advancing the rights of, and outcomes for, people who are currently underrepresented in Senedd Cymru and local government in Wales. The pilot Candidate Diversity Grant provides us with an opportunity to work with organisations who are well placed to engage people in innovative ways to support and remove barriers for aspiring candidates from groups that are currently underrepresented in our democratic institutions. We’re looking forward to working with Elect Her, Race Equality First and Shout Out UK and to learning more about how these services can help in making our democratic institutions more representative of the people they serve.