1. What progress is the Assembly making in growing food on its estate? OAQ(5)008(AC)[R]

I thank the Member for the question. In 2014, a group of staff volunteers ran a pilot scheme to assess the feasibility of growing food on the Assembly estate. As you’ll appreciate, the Assembly has almost no suitable growing space, unlike some of the other UK legislatures, and, unfortunately, it has proved not to be possible to grow food on the estate, although our caterers do grow herbs for use in the catering service.

Suzy Davies took the Chair.

I would wish to challenge that assumption, because I’m engaged in my communities in areas where there is almost no green space and green space is found to grow things. Because there’s a huge amount of evidence that it improves well-being as well as encouraging wildlife. There was an initiative in the last Assembly, spearheaded by Julie Morgan, to encourage both Members and staff to grow food or flowers on the estate, and I could easily identify areas where we could do that. For example, there are passageways that have become greenhouses in the summer, and we can be growing tomatoes, and they would look nice—and, you know, lots of win-wins there. The reason I am raising this is that I was somewhat disturbed to learn that the new chief executive had written to the Community Land Advisory Service providing a similar answer to what you are saying. I would ask you to look again at this, and I’m happy to meet you to discuss this outside the Plenary session.

I thank you for that, Jenny, for that information, and I will certainly meet with you to discuss further. However, I will answer this question in the way that I have prepared at the moment. But I will meet with you later. We are aware of the excellent initiative. As I mentioned, a group of staff volunteers did assess the feasibility of growing food on our estate. However, with almost no available green space, the pilot scheme did conclude that it would not be possible to grow any meaningful amount of food on the Assembly estate. There is a plot of land adjacent to the Senedd. However, this is not owned by the Assembly. So, whilst we have not been able to grow food, we have focused on planting wildflowers and have installed bird boxes in conjunction with the RSPB Give Nature a Home scheme to attract increased wildlife, birds, bees and butterflies within the estate. [Interruption.] The Assembly’s chief executive—sorry. The Assembly’s chief—. I heard some things. The Assembly’s chief executive has recently been corresponding with the Community Land Advisory Service and has suggested that, given the limited amount of growing space available on our estate, we may be able to help to promote its work in other ways, for example, if they explored holding an event at the Senedd. But I will meet with you later to discuss further. Thank you.