It’s a pleasure to follow my friend Jeremy Miles, and to echo his call for free thinkers to engage with the debate around our future infrastructure needs. I do have some hesitation about the emphasis on the importance of infrastructure. As we’ve discussed previously in this Chamber, the future economic pressures we face demand a more agile and rapid iterative response rather than focusing heavily on infrastructure as we have in the past. That said, we do need to take a long-term view to meet the known long-term challenges that our economy and society face, not least the climate change target that we’ve all signed up to and the implications of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. It’s quite clear the current system does not work terribly well. I remember Gerry Holtham recounting to me his experience as the Welsh Government’s advisor on finance when he had been tasked to go off to the city to try and raise alternative funds to fund the infrastructure ambitions of the Welsh Government. He patiently spent time cultivating his city contacts, agreeing a package of finance, but no sooner than he was about to sign, a Cabinet reshuffle meant that the infrastructure priorities of the Government had changed and all that work had been for nought, and back to square one it was on trying to find finance for infrastructure.

It’s crucial, though, I think, that any new body makes its decisions in a way that takes into account the long-term challenges and sets out the basis on which it makes those decisions transparently, and applies them in a consistent way. A key measurement must be value for money. We should surely prioritise those schemes that give the greatest payback. The Treasury’s Green Book very helpfully sets out a categorisation of what it regards as good value for money.

I’ll just recount briefly its guidance. A scheme that will return somewhere between £1 and £1.50 for every £1 invested is regarded as being low value for money. A scheme that returns £2 for every £1.50 invested is regarded as being medium value for money. A scheme that returns somewhere between £2 and £4 for every £1 is seen as high value for money, and anything delivering a return of over £4 is seen as delivering very high value for money. As an example of that, schemes that encourage walking and cycling for short journeys, for example, typically return about £9 for every £1 that’s invested. But, some of the schemes that we’re currently progressing or have progressed recently don’t fare terribly well according to that benchmark.

The black route of the M4, for example, is predicting a return of £1.62 for every £1 invested. And it’s worth bearing in mind that the formula used to come up with that figure is in itself heavily biased to try and make road-building schemes look attractive. So, to give you an example of how it works, it’ll project that the scheme will produce a saving in journey time of a certain number of minutes, and it’ll then estimate how many cars will make that journey; it’ll take that figure and multiply it by that year—so, in effect, it’ll randomly pick a number up that has no real basis in fact; it’s a projection—and then it’ll multiply that by 30 because that’s the number of years for which it thinks that the scheme will return an investment. So, road schemes are inflated to make them look as if they’re giving the maximum possible return for public money. Even using that formula, the schemes we’re progressing don’t fare terribly well.

Again, the A477, St Clears to Red Roses, had a return of £1.35 for every £1 invested, even using that very ambitious formula and its assumptions. That is a low return on investment. I was staggered to receive a written response from the Cabinet Secretary on the Llandeilo bypass, which in fact said it didn’t have a figure that it based its decision on to give it the go-ahead. I quote:

‘As there has been no development work carried out on the scheme over the last 10 years the Benefit to Cost Ratio (BCR) dates back to the Public Inquiry in the nineties and at that time was 1.16.’

For a £1 investment, a very low figure. He went on to say:

‘establishing a robust BCR for the project will be an early action as part of the scheme's development.’

Now, I do hope that, when we have an infrastructure commission, we won’t be giving the go-ahead to schemes without robust data to justify them and without a strong resonance for implementing the target we’ve all signed up to on climate change.

I hear muttering from Adam Price. I must say, I do find it breathtaking cynicism to hear him talk about the need for a statutory body, which would take the discretion out of the hands of Ministers, while at the same time getting an exemption for any scheme—