Lee Waters: ...to continue funding the emergency subsidy at the rate that we have. We've already spent over £100 million a year subsidising privatised companies to run buses. On top of that, a quarter of the education budget is spent on school transport. So, there are significant sums of public money going into private companies into a broken model, that has not delivered us the system that we need. And...
Lee Waters: ..., the only way to keep those services running in the meantime is through direct public support, and our budgets have been cut and we have prioritised cost-of-living pressures, pay deals and free school meals and other things, rightly. I'm not resiling from that at all, but I'm just simply pointing out to Members that they've welcomed those announcements of where this money is going to go,...
Lee Waters: ..., we spend a further £2 million subsidising the mytravelpass scheme for 16 to 21-year-olds, plus we provide £25 million of grant to local authorities for the bus services support grant, plus school transport now accounts for about a quarter of local authority education budgets. So, we're putting a lot of public money in, and on top of that, we've had the bus emergency scheme. Now, in...
Lee Waters: ...I listened with interest to what Adam Price said in the Chamber earlier, but, collectively, your party and my party have made financial choices. We've prioritised issues. We've prioritised free school meals. We've prioritised cost-of-living measures. We've prioritised, us as a Government, a pay rise for public sector workers. Those are the right things to do. But you can't spend the same...
Lee Waters: ..., where a hospital was built in the first place without public transport being thought of. Here, we have the disconnect between different services, where transport often isn't thought about by education or health providers until too late. And he talks about the specific—[Interruption.] Can I just answer the point first? He makes the specific point of a bus service not being available...
Lee Waters: ...plans. Dŵr Cymru has a commitment to reduce the average per-capita consumption of its domestic customers to 110 litres per person per day by 2050, and it plans to do this with a combination of education and behavioural change campaigns alongside increased household metering and leakage repairs. And we are continuing to work closely with them on that and Natural Resources Wales, along...
Lee Waters: My officials have been in discussions with local authorities and school transport providers throughout Wales regarding the general cost of school transport, as they continue to discharge their statutory duties in providing home-to-school transport to learners.
Lee Waters: ...of three miles, and I appreciate the point made by Luke Fletcher that that is sometimes too far for many children. I myself walked with children from Ysgol y Gwendraeth from Tumble to their school before the lockdown, a three-mile journey. They kindly asked me to carry their music bags, and, by the time I got to the school, my back was pretty tired, I must say. So, I'm sympathetic to the...
Lee Waters: ...consultation with communities, of where future infrastructure should go. Cardiff Council has submitted its latest map to us, and it shows that a thorough approach has been taken to ensure that all schools are connected to the planned active travel network. Now, that network is going to take time to be put in place. In the meantime, Cardiff Council, partly through its own resources, is...
Lee Waters: ...highlighted the good work being done by our Local Places for Nature scheme, as well as the projects, as Huw Irranca-Davies mentioned, being taken forward by town councils, housing associations, schools, the NHS and so on. I won't repeat the figures or the benefits that have been highlighted by Members. I would agree with Carolyn Thomas about the possibility from our road verges—we have...
Lee Waters: ...what might have gone wrong there. In fact, we built into the design of the scheme the ability for the Woodland Trust to deliver to people who are unable to get to a hub, and I certainly want to use schools and other community groups to aggregate demand, if they can use schools as mini distribution centres to pass on trees to families. I certainly want to explore that. We do need look at...
Lee Waters: ...and data poverty. That is no different from any other inequality we have in our society. The pattern is similar and it holds people back. I think we did great things during the pandemic, and schools did great things to make sure that pupils were given equipment, and were connected and were harnessed. But it is not a level playing field, and we spent considerable amounts of money and great...
Lee Waters: ...digital skills is hard. I'm pleased to see in the new curriculum that we have digital as one of the core competencies, but there is an issue of teacher confidence and teacher skills. Not enough schools are teaching ICT, not enough pupils are doing GCSE, A-levels, higher skills in computer science. These are the skills that we need to have to make sure that we take advantage of the huge job...
Lee Waters: ...benefit from free off-peak travel with Transport for Wales. For those age 16 to 17, TfW offers a 50 per cent discount saver railcard off many tickets. And, of course, in Wales, we've retained the educational maintenance allowance, which provides students with valuable financial support towards living costs, including public transport fares. To be clear, we want to do more, but it's also...
Lee Waters: ...projects. To give one example, the energy service helped the Egni co-op to invest more than £4 million in rooftop solar across Wales, generating free power to community organisations and to schools, in fact, including shares in the co-op to some schools in the upper Amman valley, which I think is an excellent project I'm keen to see how we can spread more widely across Wales. Despite the...
Lee Waters: ...for the close relationship Huw Irranca-Davies has with the Government, feeding that challenge through to Ministers to try and get change. And I'm very pleased that you are launching the toolkit for schools, because, clearly, disrupting the current pattern of journeys to school is an essential part of achieving modal shift, and I wish him luck with that launch.
Lee Waters: ...on implementing our manifesto commitment to develop a timber industrial strategy and create a stronger wood economy for Wales. We want every family with a garden to plant more trees, and every school and community group to sign up to the Woodland Trust free tree scheme. We need to make it easier for communities to plant trees, and easier for them to interact with authorities. As a result...
Lee Waters: I'm really encouraged by the degree of consensus there is, both on the importance of buses and on some of the measures that we need to take collectively to improve the situation. As Huw Irranca-Davies said at the outset, we need to restore the public purpose of public transport, and I thought that was a very powerful and insightful comment. And Heledd Fychan set out very powerfully how some...
Lee Waters: ...people can take everyday journeys, end to end, by foot and by bike, for all those journeys, we know, under 5 miles, where for many people it is a realistic alternative, particularly journeys to school. So, as I say, I'm happy to look in detail at the scheme and to have a further conversation.
Lee Waters: ...carrier of energy that is useful for battery storage, and that's part of the work that we are developing through our hydrogen plan. And then her point on the cultural shift needed for cycling to school. If you look at the announcement we've made on active travel this year, the schools work is perhaps the most important and the most challenging, and getting education departments and...
