Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure – in the Senedd at 1:59 pm on 9 November 2016.
I’m grateful for that reply. Picking up on a point well made by Adam Price earlier on that communities in Mid and West Wales’s need to feel more integrated with the prosperous areas of south-east Wales, does the Cabinet Secretary agree that the rebuilding of this railway line could make a contribution to that? The line was closed at a time when there was enormous pessimism about the future of rail travel in Britain in the 1960s and a great many of the Beeching-related decisions that were taken then would not have been taken if people had been able to foresee the way that the rail industry has developed in recent years. As it takes six hours to get from Aberystwyth to Cardiff by train via Shrewsbury, this would cut the journey time in half. And fortunately, there has been a big increase in the demand for rail travel: in recent years, the usage of Aberystwyth station has increased by 40 per cent in the last eight years, for example. This would give us a real prospect of reconnecting parts of Wales that perhaps feel that they’re far too distant from the areas where too much investment seems to be taking place in the minds of ordinary people, picking up again on the point that you made at the beginning of today’s proceedings about how the results of the election in America yesterday and Brexit actually derived to a great extent from feelings of exclusion and that we need to do more to connect people.