Diolch, Lywydd. I’m pleased to be among many Members from across the Chamber who’ve come together for today’s debate to ensure that we fulfil the potential of the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013.

As the motion notes, there are multiple health and well-being benefits from physical activity, and we are facing a ticking time bomb of obesity. We are finally acknowledging the all too often hidden affliction of mental health, and there are wider challenges: the damage inflicted on our natural environment from rising carbon emissions contributed to by our over-reliance on cars; the social injustice of locating services under the assumption that every family in Wales has access to a car, forcing the poorest 20 per cent to spend a quarter of their income on running a car. We commonly talk about fuel poverty applying to households who spend more than 10 per cent of their income on fuel as being in fuel poverty, but we don’t talk about transport poverty, which hits the poorest hardest.

There are few interventions that can impact across such broad and pervasive challenges, and active travel is one of them. You may not be able to persuade people who take no physical activity to go into a gym or onto a football pitch, but creating an environment that encourages active travel, which builds activity into their everyday routines, is achievable. There’s considerable potential to change the way we take short journeys. Twenty per cent of car trips are for journeys of under one mile, the kind of journey that can be made in 20 minutes on foot. And half of all car journeys—half—are for journeys of under five miles. This is the distance of a typical 30-minute bike trip on a traffic-free path, like the millennium coastal path in my constituency, or the Taff trail here in Cardiff bay.

But there are barriers, not least a physical environment that has encouraged car use and discouraged walking and cycling for short journeys. The Foresight panel on obesity coined the term ‘obesogenic’ to describe the environment we’ve built up, which they reckon will result in 60 per cent of men being obese by 2050.

Now, the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013 can play a significant part in challenging that. It has the potential to be one of the most radical of the laws introduced by the Welsh Government, and the single most important public health intervention we can introduce to reduce pressure on the NHS. Data from a long series of studies have shown the profound benefits of encouraging physical activity, from reduced risk of coronary heart disease, cancer, stroke, type 2 diabetes, to improved concentration, confidence and the alleviation of stress.

But one of the challenges for implementing this agenda is that it doesn’t fall to public health professionals to implement, but to transport professionals. And, in transport terms, this is a marginal agenda. For 50 years, transport policy has been dominated by creating more space for cars and engineering roads to allow cars to travel faster. Pedestrians and cyclists have been literally pushed to one side. So, the challenge for implementing this is to change that culture and we shouldn’t underestimate how difficult that will be. Back in February, the enterprise committee rightly pointed out that the Act needs determined leadership to succeed. But just as leadership at a ministerial level is necessary—and I know that Rebecca Evans and Ken Skates are deeply committed to this agenda—we need to see leadership at every level to set the example, to normalise the behaviour, as it was normal only a few generations ago.

We need leadership from parents: instead of clicking their kids into the backs of cars for short journeys—sometimes very short—instead to make the effort to walk. We need leadership from highway engineers, safety auditors and transport planners, to build in convenient welcoming routes as a matter of course. The national cycle network, for example, developed by the green transport charity, Sustrans, aspires to design routes that would feel safe for an unaccompanied 12-year-old on a bike. How many of our current cycle lanes or shared-use paths can truthfully pass that test?

We need leadership from GPs who, instead of routinely prescribing pills, have the confidence to encourage people who are overweight or stressed or suffering one of the number of conditions that are contributed to by physical inactivity, to get active. We need leadership from schools. Active children learn better. Bike Week is all well and good, but how do we make every day Walk to School Day, every week Bike Week? For employers, there’s ample evidence that workers who cycle to work take less sick leave, and investing in showers and cycle parking will be repaid in productivity.

So, just as there are multiple benefits from getting this right, there are multiple responsibilities for getting it right too. I want to focus on what I consider to be the primary responsibility, and one that is mentioned in the motion, and that’s ensuring the full engagement of communities.

The target audience for this agenda is not people who walk and cycle—they do it already. It’s people who do not. A coloured strip of tarmac down a busy road that suddenly disappears under parked cars will not do the trick. We only have to look to the streets that have tried that to see it. The temptation is for councils to build where it’s easiest, not where the potential for use is greatest. This is an ambitious agenda; it will be difficult and it will take time. But we need to know where people want to go—the routes that they’d be tempted to try. In some communities, it might be the daily trip to work that gets them on their bikes, in others, a Saturday trip to the local leisure centre.

We need to know about wider interventions too, beyond infrastructure, that’ll encourage them: cycle training on real road conditions for adults and children, easy-to-read maps and signage, and walking buses for kids to get to school. What’s crucial is we won’t know until we ask. Yet, in the most recent process to establish and map all existing routes, most authorities did the minimum—an online questionnaire for the statutory minimum of 12 weeks. Across Wales, just 300 people took part. That’s less than 0.01 per cent of Wales’s population. It’s essential that wider voices are heard, and, if this Act is going to be the success I know it can be, that involves targeting people who don’t currently walk and cycle.

I applaud the joint initiative by Sustrans Cymru, Living Streets, Cycling UK and Welsh Cycling to launch a simple, easy-to-use web tool to make it easy for people to suggest new and upgraded routes. But let’s be imaginative how we use it—at school gates and trampoline parks, at cinemas and pop-up venues, in workplaces and GP surgeries. These active travel plans will have a 10 to 15-year lifespan and will be linked to future Welsh Government funding. If we don’t get this initial consultation right, it’ll be hard-fought resources down the drain.

The details really matter. Five hundred thousand pounds can be spent on a new route, but an ill-considered gate or barrier can mean it won’t be used, and I’ve seen many routes fall victim to this. That’s why it’s important we build challenge into the system. Local people should be easily able to challenge and suggest improvements to local councils. The Welsh Government needs to beef up its advice, so it can challenge the plans submitted to it by local authorities. We’ve seen from the first round of maps that there’s plenty of room for challenge. We’ve got to get this right. The Government has appointed respected place designer Phil Jones to head the expert group to agree the statutory guidance to accompany the Act, and it’s very good.

Those at the front line now need training and support to make sure they can apply it properly, and the key recommendation of that active travel Act design guidance is ‘good consultation at early stages’ to help ‘avoid poor decisions’. As it says:

‘The more opportunity people have to influence and shape walking and cycling schemes for their local area, the more likely they will be to use them.’

Getting this on the statute book, Llywydd—the first piece of legislation to complete the journey from a petition to receiving the royal seal—was the easy bit. This is a radical piece of legislation and the commitment this Government has shown to an all-too-often neglected agenda should be applauded. But this landmark law will only work if it is implemented radically, and that’s why I’m delighted to open this debate today. Diolch.