Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:16 pm on 18 October 2017.
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Can I, too, add my thanks to the Members who tabled this very important debate and for all the thoughtful contributions from all Members today in the Chamber? I, too, am a bit of a car fan. Everybody who knows me at all well knows that I restore old Minis by way of relaxation at weekends. And I also feel that Wales should be on the crest of the wave, whatever analogy you want, to take this forward.
I feel obliged, I’m afraid, to address some of Gareth Bennett’s somewhat downbeat contribution with a well-known anecdote from the introduction of motor vehicles in the first place, where many countries across Europe embraced the motor vehicle, but Britain put in place legislation to make a man with a red flag walk in front of them. Consequently, almost all of the large, successful automotive firms of the twentieth century were in Germany and France, whereas we lagged behind terribly. The lesson of the Luddites is clear: you cannot hold back the tide of technology; you can only embrace it and mould it to your own ambition. And that is very much what we want to do here in Wales as part of our Government’s strategy to embrace and involve ourselves in this very welcome, in my view, change as the technology advances.
We’ll do that by having a tripod structure to stand on. And that is by having policy that embraces the change and is fleet of foot, by having infrastructure policy to go with that overarching policy that allows us to mould our investment to make sure that the new requirements for that infrastructure are in place, and also that we have a skills policy that produces the people necessary to produce both the infrastructure and, indeed, the vehicles and so on that travel on that infrastructure into the future. And there’s absolutely no reason at all why Wales couldn’t be at the forefront of all of those things.
The need for action is extremely clear, not only because the technology is upon us whether we like it or not—indeed, I hope Members will see that I do like it very much—but also because, actually, it allows us to set a clear pathway for Wales in terms of decarbonisation and very seriously good renewable energy generation at the same time.
We have to be ahead of this game. We have to understand intelligent transport systems, the integration of information—