Thanks, Cabinet Secretary, for the statement today. Can I start by welcoming yesterday’s announcement, alongside colleagues, about the extra rolling stock to increase capacity? I’m sure like many colleagues here, my inbox was full of correspondence from constituents regarding restrictions with our current rolling stock, particularly when you find yourself travelling from north to south Wales or vice versa, either on a single carriage or a very crowded two-carriage train. I’m sure, Cabinet Secretary, you will be familiar with that experience. Indeed, in your statement today you talk about the enhanced north to south Wales services in each direction in the morning and evening, and the better quality rolling stock as part of that, and how the procurement exercise will look for future rail services, and looking at improvements that include things like making it actually modern-day travel—so, the provision of charging points. Whilst it’s brilliant to see the Wi-Fi on a lot of Arriva trains, and it has revolutionised my experience on the train, I think it’d be quite nice if you could actually plug in and charge your now Wi-Fi enabled iPad whilst on the journey. I look forward to seeing that brought in across rolling stock in the future.

Whilst north-south improvements are key, I think, as you’ll be aware, east-west links and vice versa are crucial to the economy in north-east Wales. I was pleased to see the work finally commencing on the Halton curve this week. I wondered whether you could elaborate on what you say in your statement about the close working between the Welsh Government and the Department for Transport, but also, actually, what work Transport for Wales has done and will do in terms of working with those operators over the border in the north-west of England, such as Merseytravel, to make sure that we truly have an interconnected service across the border in north Wales.

Just one final thing. You say in the statement that

‘The north-east Wales metro will be a part of a wider transport modernisation programme across north Wales that recognises the opportunities for achieving economic growth and well-being that can be realised from improved connectivity for all transport modes within the region and across borders.’

That’s absolutely key to a constituency like mine, where there’s only currently one mainline station, so, actually, the involvement of buses, and making that interconnected, is crucial. Also, whilst I welcome the announcement of additional stations at the Deeside industrial park, which will be key to getting constituents of mine in the west to work—I know we’ve recently made those announcements, but, perhaps, in the future further consideration could be given to looking at whether additional stations could be on that line, perhaps at Greenfield, which would not only connect people going to work from the west of Flintshire to the east, but would actually serve to connect with the buses to, perhaps, regenerate the town of Holywell, and could also provide good links to Mostyn docks, which I feel embodies the link between the energy of the west of north Wales and the advanced manufacturing of the east.