Of course, many of the promises prior to devolution and one of the core tenets of devolution was to shorten the divide between north and south Wales. Indeed, the 1999 Welsh Labour manifesto stated:

‘We believe that improved north/south links essential to the future economic, social and cultural cohesion of Wales.’

And it promised to address the need, then, for improved road links and to introduce a new, faster rail service. Their coalition partners, the Lib Dems, promised the improvement of the quality of the strategic north-south road network. And the Plaid Cymru manifesto of the same year featured as a key objective the improvement of links within Wales and between north and south, promising a fast rail service from the north-west to Cardiff as an urgent priority, along with

‘a decent “figure-of-eight” road network giving north-south links to the four corners of Wales and connections with the main east-west routes such as the A40, the A55 and the M4.’

Here we are, 17 years on—17 years of broken promises from Labour, Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems. The Wales Audit Office has recently criticised the Welsh Government for not doing enough to evaluate the benefits of its investment in Welsh railways. Arriva Trains Wales has the oldest rolling stock in the UK, with each train on average 27 years old, and the Cardiff-Anglesey air-link subsidy has now risen 27 per cent again in a year, costing taxpayers over £1 million annually. And whilst the Welsh Government has reduced spending on motorways, trunk roads, rail and air combined in its 2016-17 budget by 1.7 per cent, the UK Government has increased its transport budget by 3.6 per cent, and the Scottish Government has increased spending on motorways, trunk roads and rail services by 4.6 per cent.

Now, in 2016, Labour promised to unlock the potential for north Wales through the development of a north Wales metro system, and to deliver upgrades of the A55, yet there remains no detail, no plan and no vision whatsoever in the current programme for government for this. Meanwhile, the UK Conservative Government are actively exploring the electrification of the north Wales line, whilst continuing their £70 billion investment into UK transport to include the £10.7 million investment for the Halton Curve, trebling the annual investment in roads, and committing £300 million earlier this year for major projects, such as high speed 3 and the Trans-Pennine tunnel. Furthermore, they have also awarded the Welsh Government £900 million in borrowing powers, to be used over five years, to deliver much-needed improvements to infrastructure, including the A55. Yet, so far, the Welsh Labour Government has failed to utilise these powers to bring about any improvements in the North Wales region.

Llywydd, BBC Wales recently ran an article about north to south Wales travel, entitled ‘A jigsaw piece missing’. For those of us—and I mean myself as an Assembly Member travelling weekly, people wanting to do business here in the capital, and visitors to the home of devolution, here in Cardiff Bay—who undertake, or try to, this journey on a regular basis, we might just argue that there is more than one piece missing.

North Wales has the assets, it has the people and it has the entrepreneurship, businesses and ideas. It’s the Welsh Government that must recognise now that it does hold responsibility far wider than the Cardiff Bay bubble, and that it must take real action, using the borrowing powers from the UK Government to improve and upgrade transport links within, to and from our glorious north Wales.