I’m pleased to speak on what I thought was a consensual motion—I’m not so sure now, having listened to Neil McEvoy’s comments, but, hopefully, all parties in this Chamber can come together around certain key tenets of this motion. This has been an historic week, after all: the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Milton Keynes new town—a brave new world of freedom, or the frustrating godforsaken land of the roundabout, depending on your viewpoint and your opinion of what we’re trying to achieve in our cities, and have been since the war. We debate many different issues in the Chamber, many of which have an impact on people’s lives—some more than others. But the environment immediately around us plays a profound role in our lives, in our development as human beings, our happiness and our well-being. It’s because of this that urban renewal and regeneration is so closely linked to well-being, and has been recognised to be so for such a very long time, going back to the development of the first garden city in the UK at Letchworth, in the early 1900s, and then again revisited in the renewed post-second world war development of new towns in the new town programme of Clement Attlee’s Government.

We’re today debating this subject in this incredible building, referred to by David Melding in his opening remarks as a beacon of sustainability, in Cardiff Bay, in an area that has been transformed as a result of inner city regeneration polices begun in the 1980s, spearheaded in those days by one former Environment Secretary, Michael Heseltine. So, this is probably a very appropriate venue to discuss where we go from here and how we make the most of our urban environment in Wales and deliver the type of benefits we know are within our grasp, with the right approach and the right mindset.

I think it’s fitting that we’re debating this in the wake of the historic signing of the Cardiff capital city deal, so important for the regeneration of parts of south Wales, such as the south Wales Valleys and, indeed, some of the poorer parts of our rural areas, so often neglected when we consider regeneration. It’s not just an issue of regenerating urban areas; our rural areas need regeneration as well and, as a result of the city deal, their destinies will be in many ways linked.

David Melding set the scene for this debate with a wide-ranging introduction. If I can just focus on the transport aspect of the debate, which he did mention and, specifically, the transport element of the city deal, because they’re closely related, I think, first and foremost, the Welsh Government must do more to promote walking and cycling in Wales. This, at the end of the day, takes the strain off other transport, forms of transportation, higher up the chain. So, if you can’t get the walking and cycling right, we can’t get the other aspects right, either, because they’ll be overly relied upon.

Infrastructure improvements must be made if the Cardiff city region is going to successfully promote green travel, and it’s been a while now since we passed the Active Travel (Wales) Act—I think it was back in 2013. As Chair, then, of the Enterprise and Business Committee, my concern was that the Active Travel (Wales) Act would languish on a shelf somewhere, not actually improving things out there in our communities. Okay, well, we’re two years in and I think the jury is still out on how successful it will be, but I think one thing we all realise increasingly is we do need that Act to succeed; we do need walking and cycling to be promoted and encouraged.

The former Enterprise and Business Committee also looked at integrated ticketing—as Professor Stuart Cole described it, a devilishly difficult thing to achieve. Integrating services makes travel on public transport simpler, flexible, and more convenient for passengers, who can have a seamless connection between bus and rail travel. In that situation, passengers would have a greater knowledge of how extensive public transport can be in their area and it can encourage more people to begin using public transport. Sadly, as we know, pilots like Go Cymru were scrapped before they could really get going—pardon the pun. In future, we do need to develop more integrated ticketing, whatever form that may take, and new technology will allow for new forms of integrated transport of a type we haven’t really yet considered.

I would say, in moving to conclusion, that Neil McEvoy painted quite a bleak picture of where we are at the moment in Wales, and in Cardiff specifically. Well, if you think things are bad now—you did mention the 1970s, Neil, and it’s hard to believe that the Buchanan report, back then, advised the opposite to what we’re talking about now. That advised the closure of railway lines in Cardiff, the demolition of thousands of houses, and the creation of an urban motorway network, including the notorious and hated Hook Road. That was so extensive, all of that would have taken until 2001 to complete. Only Eastern Avenue in Cardiff was actually finally built of that programme. So, I think the moral is that planners aren’t always right, Governments aren’t always right, but I think Governments try, and I’m sure that this Cabinet Secretary will do his best to make sure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, that we take stock of where we are and we move on to a brighter, better, greener, more sustainable future.