Diolch, Ddirprwy Lywydd. I think there’s some common ground with the motion that Plaid Cymru have put down. There is no doubt that the face of retail has changed dramatically over the last 20 years and we don’t want town centres just to be a place of shops. We want them to be more than that; we want them to be hubs of the community. On that, I think we can all agree.

What I found depressing from Sian Gwenllian’s speech was the focus on car parking as the main answer to that. I find that depressing for two reasons: one is double standards, but also the fact that it’s a false premise. First, on the double standards, in Carmarthenshire, Plaid Cymru campaigned heavily for free car parking ahead of taking control of the local authority. We heard about it ad nauseam, week after week, and as soon as they took over control of the council, not only did they not deliver free car parking as they promised they would, but they made the situation worse. They’re now expanding the out-of-town Parc Trostre retail park, at a time when they’re claiming to show sympathy for the town centre.

They’ve set up a taskforce that doesn’t meet and the local business improvement district claims not to be supported by the council. And so, the words we had about delivering free car parking, which you’ve heard repeated again this afternoon—when they get the chance to put them into practice, they did not deliver on them.

The other point that I think is hypocritical: yesterday, we sat through Leanne Wood chastising the Government for not emphasising enough its target for tackling climate change, lamenting the fact that we didn’t talk enough about the 2020 target and emphasising the importance and the urgency of tackling climate change. Today, a day after, we have a stress on a policy that would make climate change worse; it would increase car dependency. So, there’s a profound contradiction in support here, on the one hand saying we need to think differently and do differently, and, a day after, saying we should put all our eggs in the basket of increasing car traffic, despite the fact that, given the chance—[Interruption.] No, let me proceed. Despite the fact that, when given the chance to put this policy into practice, they’ve done nothing.

On the second—[Interruption.] Let me just make some progress. The second reason I find this depressing is that this rests on a false premise—there is no such thing as free car parking. The money has to come from somewhere, and it currently comes from other services—from social services and from education. The cost of providing a so-called free car parking space, according to the Department for Transport, is between £300 and £500 a year for one space. It’s not free; it’s paid for. In Carmarthenshire—I looked at their budget for 2016-17, and that shows a revenue expenditure allocation of £1.9 million for car parks, alongside an income of almost £3.2 million a year for car parks. In one year. So, forgoing that income and meeting the cost of car parking would, potentially, amount to some £5 million in Carmarthenshire alone. And it’ll create more demand. We can only look at hospital car parking, since we’ve introduced free car parking there. The car parks are rammed, and in almost every car park we have demand for extra car parking space, at a cost of between £300 and £500 a year.

So, not only are you not sticking to your words on tackling climate change, not only are you not doing what you said you’d do in Carmarthenshire, but you’re taking money away from vital services to subsidise car owners, and also creating more demand for that.

Bear in mind that a quarter of all households don’t have a car. Now, the evidence on car parking regenerating town centres is, at best, weak. It’s based on shopkeepers thinking that most of their customers come by car, which is not true. The most recent survey in Bristol town centre showed that just a fifth of shoppers travelled by car. Retailers tend to overestimate the importance of car-borne trade by almost 100 per cent. Shoppers, when they’re asked, would much rather see a better pedestrian environment, wider pavements and pedestrianisation rather than free car parking. In fact, Living Streets, in their report ‘The pedestrian pound’, showed that making places better for walking could boost trade by 40 per cent—