In the last year, mid-Wales has faced the threat of closure to primary schools, healthcare services, leisure centres, reduced transport timetables and hundreds left stranded without power after storm Darragh.

One thing is clear – mid-Wales needs better investment in its infrastructure, and it needs it now.

This week the Cambrian News followed your MP’s to Westminster to see what they’re doing to fix this.

Ceredigion Preseli’s MP Ben Lake is uniquely positioned to lobby for financial reform as the Plaid Cymru Treasury Spokesperson.

But he says lobbying the Treasury for things like the funds owed from the HS2 project (which according to Plaid amounts to £4bn) isn’t enough – he wants to overhaul the formula that calculates how much money the devolved nations get.

During the Cambrian News’ visit, Mr Lake said: “The Barnett formula is the alpha and the omega when it comes to funding public services and infrastructure investment.

“If we don’t get it working fairly, then no matter how much of a case we make for other things, the funding won't be there to realise them.

“It was designed in the 70s and its designer Joel Barnett said it was a temporary measure.

“It’s a big priority for me, it needs to change without a doubt.”

The Barnett formula is based on two main figures – the first is the ‘comparability percentage’, which represents the percentage of services devolved to that nation.

For example – healthcare is devolved to Wales, so that department has a comparability factor of 100 per cent, as opposed to defence which is not devolved, so has a factor of 0.

The second is the ‘population proportion’, which calculates the relative population of each nation, aiming to give the same pound-per-person funding to each government.

Mr Lake said: “Currently the Scots aren’t keen to touch it because they're getting more than they should.

“They know it but if we’re in the business of fairness, that means taking the rough with the smooth.

“Updating the formula may mean some areas of Wales actually get less, but I'd far prefer we have our actual share.

“At its heart, it's a population-based calculation.

“At first glance, that seems sensible but there are significant issues with this for rural communities.

“In theory, if the population covered by Hywel Dda Health Board were concentrated in a more urban setting we’d probably get away with needing just two district hospitals, but it’s not.

“The cost of taking care of that population differs according to context.

“I’ve pleaded this with the new government and previous one to start a review of the formula.

“I understand why they don't want to - it's scary and would fundamentally change the way the UK operates.

“But ‘change’ was on [Labour’s] ballot so I am pushing them to do more.

“A formula is also only as good as the data you put into it – they are currently using 2001 census data, but we’ve had two censuses since then.

“Labour could improve the formula by updating the data.”

He states the consequences of this disproportionate funding are clear – centralisation is the word on the lips of all mid-Wales county councils, especially Powys County Council whose unpopular schemes would centralise health care into hubs in the north and south of Wales’ biggest county, proposing to do the same for leisure centres.

Meanwhile, Ceredigion’s Bronglais Hospital may lose its stroke unit, with ‘centralisation’ impacting patients out of county by taking specialist facilities further away from patients in north-west Powys and southern Gwynedd, sending them instead to Withybush in Haverfordwest or Prince Phillip Hospital in Llanelli.

Mr Lake said he is “very concerned” about the move to centralise services, stating that he “doesn’t think centralisation works for rural areas”.

Instead, Mr Lake says for hospitals and secondary care, Wales should be looked at “as a unit” rather than siloed by healthboards, so that patients in north Powys and south Gwynedd are considered when eyeing up closures in Ceredigion.

To give the healthboards the funding to do this, Mr Lake is tackling the Barnett formula.

Plaid Cymru Westminster leader Liz Saville-Roberts and MP for Dwyfor Meirionnydd explained from Westminster Hall how Plaid Cymru were working to get the Crown Estate devolved to Wales: “Our role here is to make sure Wales gets fair play and to maximize how much spending power we manage for ourselves rather than the Treasury.

“The Crown Estate money [generated in Wales] goes to the Treasury – that's not the case in Scotland.

“In Scotland, they decide how that money is used to benefit local supply chains and communities.

“[Having the same power] would strengthen our arm rather than needing a begging bowl to ask for extra funding here.

“It’s interesting that before the election Welsh Labour Senedd members could be heard quoting the same need for the Crown Estate to be devolved.

“Now they’re in power – hey ho, they’re not doing it, are they?

“Our job is to lobby for what we could do differently and to call out hypocrisy.

“If Labour talks about having a partnership at both ends of the M4, then why are we still missing out?”

The Crown Estate is an independent company owned by the monarch, with land and assets valuing £15.5bn, £853m of which are in Wales.

The Estate owns all UK seabed to 12 nautical miles, with jurisdiction over new offshore wind farms.

A bill was tabled in November looking to update the 1961 Crown Estate Act to allow more investment and borrowing powers.

At its second reading on 7 January, Plaid Cymru tabled a motion to devolve control of the Welsh portion to Wales, with Plaid MP Llinos Medi stating: “In the age of coal Wales saw a huge extraction of wealth from our communities.

“In 2025, Wales is now experiencing a similar process of the extraction of our green wealth.

“The situation is worse than that with Welsh councils having to pay a lease fee to use the land owned by the Crown Estate, and in 2023 this was nearly £300,000.

“With huge pressures on councils’ budgets, how can that be justified?”

Outside of fundamental reforms to Wales’ income, other MPs are looking to make the most of current Welsh infrastructure projects.

Plaid Cymru MP Ann Davies hit the ground running in her first six months serving for Caerfyrddin covering Carmarthenshire.

Known for her campaigning on electricity pylon projects that would bisect her constituency, in parliament she’s working to protect the landscape from being “desecrated by this steel infrastructure”.

Though installing improved electricity cabling could help Wales’ rural communities from being cut off in storms, she said these needed infrastructure projects must consider the communities they directly impact.

Speaking from her new Westminster office, she said: “No one denies that we need more electricity infrastructure, but it's the way they’re doing it.

“If underground cabling is good enough for Belgium, Holland or Denmark, where Bute Energy [who runs the Tywi-Usk pylon project] originates, then it's good enough for Wales.

“We’ve got four new electricity lines going through Caerfyrddin.

“We have a chain of castles and ancient monuments along the new Tywi-Usk pylon line, from Cynghordy viaduct, an important site, to Llansteffan Castle at the estuary.

“They obviously hadn’t done any work researching the area at all, who else in their right mind would put a pylon structure over the ancient hillfort Garn Goch?

“For goodness' sake - if we don’t respect what we have within our own communities, what hope is there for us? So, get [the pylons] underground.

“We wouldn’t have had half of the power outages during Storm Darragh if all our lines were underground, as it was mostly caused by trees which downed cables.”

Her campaigning on this is moving forward – an independent advisory group is expected to report back in February comparing costs for open-cut cable ploughing versus pylons.

She said: “If these figures come out anywhere near each other then, my word, we’ll be fighting on full cylinders to make underground cabling happen.”

When not advocating as “the voice of Carmarthenshire”, she is back at home on her dairy farm in Llanarthney.

Though Labour argues the amended farming inheritance tax rules would help ease the funding pressures across the UK, Ms Davies states it won’t benefit Wales or the UK in the long run: “Farmers’ Union of Wales (FUW) research shows that the inheritance tax would impact 93-100 per cent of farms.

“We know with Welsh hill farms level of income, between £20-25,000 a year, is not going to be enough to pay that tax and make a living.

“This will have a knock-on effect on food security – right now we don’t grow enough food in this country to feed ourselves.

“If anything horrible should happen and we land in another war, we won’t have enough.”

Last month Steve Witherden, the new Labour MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, received two coachloads of Powys farmers to his Westminster office.

Despite his party putting forward the amendments to inheritance tax which would end farmers 100 per cent exemption, asking them to pay 20 per cent on assets more than £1m, he is not in support of the changes in their current form: “I believe it needs to change and have made no secret of that.

“I have worked closely with the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), FUW and the farmers in my constituency and written letters to the Treasury and DEFRA (the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).

“My role which I take very seriously is to try and effect change to the policy to mitigate it.

“I've always seen this as being about food security.

“We’ve seen in recent years Brexit, the global pandemic and the war in the Donbas (Ukraine).

“As a result, the food prices have skyrocketed, food scarcity and empty shelves.

“It is a top priority for me to keep our food producers as stable and as secure as we possibly can.”

When he’s not supporting farmers making their voices heard in parliament, Mr Witherden is lobbying to make wind farms work for Wales.

Wind farms are an issue that has uniquely plagued mid-Wales – in one week in November, three European energy companies announced proposals to erect three wind farms in the same Llanbrynmair valley – totalling 56 turbines at 230m tall.

Though Mr Witherden welcomes infrastructure projects that will create more sustainable electricity for rural communities, he doesn’t welcome profits from Wales’ natural resources going to multinationals.

He said the answer is to create community-owned windfarms where the profits stay in the underfunded communities that are next door: “I’ve written to the minister to see funding to support more community-based energy projects in the spirit of the Great British Energy Bill, rather than these gigantic projects by big multinationals.

“In lieu of that, if the multinationals want support from communities they need to dig deeper into their pockets.

“The funding offered by them to communities is trifling to the megabucks they would see if those projects were implemented.”

Speaking in his new House of Commons office, he added that each project should be assessed on a “case by case basis”: “In every decision, we must look at the effect it would have on plant life, animal life, the wider environment, on residents and local tourism.

“There are so many areas of my constituency that aren’t official Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty but should be.

“These windfarms would concrete over peat land, a carbon sink that is being eroded.

“The land is also an important habitat for species like palmate newts who prefer higher ground and whose habitat is being lost.”

For this reason, Mr Witherden voted in favour of the Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill which saw its second reading in the House of Commons on 24 January.