Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:52 pm on 17 October 2017.
The blame for the failure to electrify is at the feet of the UK Government. It was they who made the promise to electrify the line; it was they who withdrew, who reneged, on that promise to electrify that line. We know that the cost is about £500 million to electrify between Cardiff and Swansea. We want to make sure, as our plans have shown, whether it’s via the metro or whether it’s more widely through the franchise—we want to run better trains more frequently on our railway lines. I don’t think it would have made a blind bit of difference, to be honest with you, if we’d specified it in the franchise; they would still have withdrawn their funding.