Thank you, Presiding Officer. Can I thank the Minister for responding to the debate and at least welcome in part what she said in terms of some of the action that’s been taken. I’ll attempt to restate my arguments in a more persuasive way for Angela Burns and possibly for Caroline Jones.

Amendment 45—I think it’s important to remember that the Welsh Government has already stated that it intends, as I think the Minister just mentioned, to produce national guidance for local health board directors of public health, local authority directors of public protection, and Public Health Wales, encouraging them to support the delivery of local air quality management. So, I think there’s already in the pipeline some of this obligation coming through. I admit this is a more statutory approach, but some of that has already been done. I also would like to draw everyone’s attention, really, to the fact that the British Lung Foundation think that this could actually save money in the long term. The amendment itself is not prescriptive about the method in which alerts—if I can put it that way—are delivered. So, it may well be that local authorities would be the delivery mechanism; it’s just an obligation on the health boards to prepare that information. It's similar to what’s being proposed at the moment in London, where it’s seen as a very important part of living in that city: that you know what your public health is when you walk out of the door, which area is polluted or not. The British Lung Foundation, as I said, say that this could reduce the risk of unavoidable exacerbation for those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other prevalent lung conditions and, therefore, potentially reduce hospitalisation. So, I think there's a way of trying to ensure that this is affordable and is a reasonable approach to ensure that people do not unnecessarily expose their own health or the health of their children to very poor air pollution.

The Member herself mentioned Hafodyrynys, where there’s very poor air pollution in Wales. I think there are four areas in Wales: Hafodyrynys is one; Mountain Ash is another; and somewhere in Swansea, I think, around the Swansea high street, by the station, is a third. I can't remember the fourth off the top of my head. I really would wonder if you asked people walking in those areas, ‘What is the air pollution here? Is it safe or not?’ I don't think that they'd be able to answer you, and I think that is the information we need to get out there so that they can take the necessary steps to protect themselves and their families.

I think the overall debate, and why I'm not completely convinced by the Minister's response, is that we've had a process for dealing with air quality for quite some time in Wales now. We have 40 air quality management areas—no significant improvement in those areas, otherwise some of them would have been revoked or changed in some way. That hasn't happened. Our current system is not working in areas of high air pollution, as Angela Burns mentioned. Really, I think it's not enough to rely on the UK Government to produce its own statute and then to, sort of, dovetail the Welsh bits into that.

The 2016 state of natural resources report by Natural Resources Wales says that breaches in emission targets pose a threat to human health and the natural environment. So, as I said earlier, the fact that it’s in environmental legislation already is not a reason for not putting it in public health legislation. In fact, it's a really good way of making that, sort of, circuit close and it’s a really good way of making sure that the ambitions in previous legislations, such as the well-being of future generations Act, are really carried out in practice and in detail in statute.

The final point, if I may: there's a social justice issue to this. The areas that have already been mentioned as suffering from poor air quality you might notice are also areas of quite real social deprivation as well. Huw Brunt, who’s the head of Public Health Wales, has undertaken a study of air pollution, deprivation and health, and that revealed that health outcomes for people living in deprivation were even poorer when they were located in areas of high air pollution. Mr Brunt argued for an effective air quality management approach, one which combines national level actions to assess and reduce risks for all, and local level intervention, targeted in high-risk communities to reduce air pollution and health inequalities. Only today, a study was quoted in ‘The Times’, for the United States, pointing out that those living in areas with the worst air pollution are about 10 per cent more likely to get cancer, a greater impact on cancer rates than either dirty water or toxic chemicals.

So, I would argue, and Plaid Cymru argues, that without a national Wales strategy on air pollution, the Welsh Government is failing to deliver on its own targets of a healthier, resilient, more equal and globally responsive Wales.