The following amendment has been selected: amendment 1 in the name of Jane Hutt.

Symudwn ymlaen yn awr at yr eitem nesaf ar yr agenda, sef dadl y Ceidwadwyr Cymreig ar docynnau teithio rhatach ar fysiau a threnau ar gyfer pobl ifanc, a galwaf ar Russell George i gynnig y cynnig.

Motion NDM6534 Paul Davies

To propose that the National Assembly for Wales:

Calls on the Welsh Government to:

a) extend eligibility for free bus travel entitlements to all 16 to 24 year olds in Wales; and

b) extend eligibility for railcard privileges to all 16 to 24 year olds in Wales.

Motion moved.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I move the motion in the name of Paul Davies, which calls on the Assembly to extend the eligibility for free bus travel entitlements and railcard privileges to all 16 to 24-year-olds in Wales. I think our debate this afternoon is very relevant to follow on from the previous debate.

As Members may appreciate, we are unable to support the Welsh Government’s amendment, which seeks to delete our motion in its entirety. I must say, though, that I welcome the fact that the Welsh Government appears to be following in the footsteps in consulting on a new scheme to support young people in using public transport and reforming the mytravelpass scheme—a scheme that, despite sinking millions into it, has not really lived up to its initial potential and has been characterised as having disappointing take-up.

The aim of this motion, Deputy Presiding Officer, is to help relieve young people of the financial challenges that they face in today’s economic climate through the introduction of a scheme designed to make public transport more accessible and levelling the playing field for younger people. Young adults tend to have the lowest wages, the highest car insurance premiums, they suffer most from Wales’s housing crisis, and they’ve also suffered the uncertainty of not knowing whether their tuition fees will be rising yet again—and this, of course, has compounded the concerns of younger people regarding the costs of higher education. Therefore, our green card scheme that we have proposed could lift the barrier to accessing education and training for jobs for many people in Wales.

Indeed, this is an issue that faces many young people in my own constituency, where the cost of accessing public transport is a major hurdle for many young adults as they try to access further and higher education. As a result of the schools and colleges in some areas of mid Wales providing increasingly limited courses, the financial constraints and sheer difficulty of accessing further education elsewhere means that young people are either not pursuing their first choice of subject, or not pursuing further education at all. So, I’d suggest that we must act. I struggle to see how the Welsh Government’s ‘Prosperity for All’ strategy can become a reality without sufficient measures being put in place to reduce the cost of public transport for younger people.

The justification for this motion stems from the obstacles that younger people are facing in today’s Wales. Welsh workers now have the lowest weekly wages in the UK. Shockingly, in Scotland, a pay packet contains £43 more per week than that of a Welsh worker. As a result of this, younger people are facing a bleak outlook in terms of their earning potential. I believe that by providing a free bus service and a rail card, this will play a role in enabling younger people to pursue employment or further education, especially as 18 to 21-year-olds are more likely to use a bus than any other age group. Our young people depend heavily on the bus and rail network to access work and education opportunities, so we on these benches believe that they should be supported in that.

I would like to note that our proposal has been met with highly positive feedback from the Confederation of Passenger Transport, who were delighted by Welsh Conservatives’ efforts to support the use of buses by younger people. We proposed two fully costed initiatives that we believe would reduce the financial burden facing younger people in Wales. So, in order to help younger people reach their potential, I think the Welsh Government must make public transport more accessible to a struggling age group, and our free bus travel scheme will also have substantial environmental benefits that go beyond the immediate benefits to young people themselves, encouraging people to switch from private motoring to public transport. This is, of course, consistent with the Welsh Government’s aims to reduce vehicle emissions, and will also reinvigorate the bus industry.

As I said last week in a contribution, it’s clear that if young people are introduced to public transport early, they stick with it and continue to use public transport in later life. So, I do believe that our proposals for free unlimited transport for 16 to 24-year-olds is a crucial step to ensuring young people make the most of their potential, building ambition and encouraging learning, which the Welsh Government strategy, ‘Prosperity for All’, seeks to achieve. I therefore commend our motion this afternoon to the Assembly, and I look forward to hearing Members’ contributions to this debate this afternoon.

Thank you very much. I have selected the amendment to the motion, and I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure to move formally amendment 1.

Amendment 1—Jane Hutt

Delete all and replace with:

To propose that the National Assembly for Wales:

1. Recognises the economic, educational and social importance of supporting young people with the costs of public transport.

2. Notes the consultation launched by the Welsh Government to develop a new and ambitious Youth Travel Pass scheme from 2018 that can encourage more young people to travel by bus.

3. Recognises the need for any proposals to be fully costed.

4. Notes the importance of engaging widely with young people, local authorities, education providers and bus operators to ensure any extension of provision is targeted towards those that need the greatest support.

5. Notes the Welsh Government’s intention through Transport for Wales to encourage more young people onto a sustainable, integrated and multi-modal transport network.

Amendment 1 moved.

Amendment 1.

Thank you very much. Paul Davies.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I’m pleased to take part in this debate this afternoon. As Russell George has said, good public transport is essential for younger people in Wales who rely on buses and trains to access educational classes, weekend jobs, after-school clubs and sports—the list goes on. Access to these opportunities and activities is integral to the development of the next generation, who continue to make it clear that they want to see better public transport. Members may remember that the UK Youth Parliament voted to make public transport cheaper, better and accessible their priority campaign for 2012. This UK campaign emerged from a nationwide poll of 65,000 young people, which identified the top-five issues of concern for young people, and clearly public transport was very much at the top of that agenda. Therefore, it’s important that Governments at all levels show that they are listening to the views of young people when it comes to providing transport services.

Of course, it’s also important that the bus and rail industry are also listening and engaging with young people too, as young people are an important market for public travel. Indeed, quite often young people will have no option but to use bus and rail services before they learn to drive. Therefore, public transport providers must ensure that young people have a positive experience of travelling publicly to encourage them to continue using buses and rail into adulthood, even if they learn to drive or buy a car.

We live in an age where it takes seconds to send a tweet or update a status on Facebook, and so it’s clear that young people can be a great influence, or a strong critic, of public transport and that’s something that perhaps the bus and rail industry haven’t taken that seriously in the past. Therefore, perhaps there’s an opportunity here for bus and rail service operators to engage more with younger people when developing services and even campaigns in the future, by using these digital platforms much more than they’ve done in the past to communicate with young people.

Therefore, given the importance of public transport to young people, this motion is today calling on the Welsh Government to support the introduction of a new green card scheme to provide all 16 to 24-year-olds in Wales with access to unlimited free bus travel and discounted rail travel. I think that this scheme sends a clear signal to young people across Wales that we recognise the concerns that they have surrounding public transport, and that we’re looking at ways that we can better support them.

This policy will also help strengthen and support the bus industry in Wales by encouraging more and more young people to use public transport, thereby protecting those bus services for the future, which is particularly important in rural areas and the constituency that I represent. A scheme like this will undoubtedly make some bus services, especially in rural areas, much more sustainable.

Of course, the use of public transport can be even more of a barrier to young people with learning difficulties who quite often find the public transport system complex and intimidating. One of the most effective ways that the Welsh Government can support young people with learning difficulties using the public transport network is by simply increasing understanding and tolerance of the challenges that face young people with learning difficulties. I’ve had many representations from groups such as Pembrokeshire People First, and I should declare an interest as their president. Groups like Pembrokeshire People First continue to advocate policies to make public transport more accessible to people with learning difficulties, and one of their calls has been for free entitlements to bus travel. Hopefully, this scheme will help in some way by encouraging more young people with learning difficulties to use public transport, thereby building up their confidence and encouraging them to live more independently and engage in the wider community.

The importance of providing good public transport is certainly felt in rural areas, where services are fewer and costs are higher. For young people living in rural areas like Pembrokeshire, the geography simply is not as interconnected as other parts of Wales. Therefore, I believe there’s a case here for making better use of the existing transport fleet in rural local authority areas by developing more of a partnership approach with those delivering transport services in local communities. This would mean bringing together a range of agencies and stakeholders, along with local authority departments, to centrally co-ordinate and schedule public transport, by taking into account capacity on the mainstream network and hopefully identifying gaps in transport provision where solutions can be met jointly. With funding tight for many local authorities in rural areas, alternative options are needed to support transport availability for young people, and perhaps a collaborative approach that can co-ordinate public transport is an effective way forward.

Therefore, in closing, Deputy Presiding Officer, at the very heart of this debate is the desire to deliver more support and independence to younger people. I believe that, to do this, the Welsh Government, public transport providers and young people themselves have to work together to make services more affordable, accessible and acceptable. Our proposals aim to give young people the independence to travel more freely around Wales by offering free bus travel and discounted rail travel to young people, and I urge Members to support our motion.

Today, when you speak to any young person about the sorts of things they want to see from politics, public transport, both its availability and its cost, are always pretty near the top of the list. Through the Neath area economic forum, we heard a story of a young man who’d lost confidence due to a failed job placement, which had broken down as a result of his having to depend on bus transport from the top of the Neath valley into Neath and onwards into Cardiff. The difficulty of making that journey work for him had led to him losing his job and set him back, really, on the road to sustainable employment. So, young people definitely need a new deal for bus users and one that gives them free or cheap travel, but that also improves travel times and experience. And that’s about bus prioritisation, planning issues and technology, as we’ve discussed several times before in this Chamber.

On the cost of travel, I welcome the Welsh Government’s consultation on extending the age of discounted travel to those aged 24, and I’d encourage young people across Wales to respond to that consultation with their views so we can hear what matters to them. I also think it’s right that the Welsh Government should keep alive the option, if needs be, of a mandatory scheme to build on the voluntary arrangements if that should prove to be necessary. But the debate today on the Welsh Conservatives’ motion is not about those things; the motion repeats the policy that the Conservatives have been pushing in the press in recent weeks, which has the virtue of consistency if little else.

They claim that offering free bus travel and a third off rail fares would cost £25 million. Let’s examine that. There are currently some 15,000 pass holders who will take approximately 1.5 million journeys on buses by March 2018. On the basis of those figures, you can assume that a completely free travel pass would be used by many more young people. Assuming an adult bus ticket price costs around £2 and some 350,000 people would be potentially eligible, the price tag for the Conservative proposal is not £25 million, it’s probably much nearer £70 million—and that’s just for the bus element, let alone the rail discount. Now, I’ve got a calculator if anybody wants to borrow it.

But they tell us that they want to scrap education maintenance allowance in order to pay for part of it, just like their Tory colleagues did in Westminster—the EMA, which, by the way, supports 26,000 students to stay in education. Now, if you’re one of those students—and we’ve heard a lot about educational opportunities from the bench opposite today—if you’re one of those students the Conservative plan would take away from you more than £1,500 a year. Russell George has said that transport costs are a huge barrier to education and I agree, but what on earth do you call a £1,500 hit? I call that a huge barrier too.

And, if the Tory bus policy isn’t puzzling enough, their policy of a third off rail travel is already national rail policy. So, I won’t be backing the Tory motion today, because it doesn’t help young people and it doesn’t add up. I urge young people to respond to the Welsh Government’s consultation and to tell us what they want from discounted bus travel so they can get policy that works for them.

It’s a pleasure to take part in this debate this afternoon. Plaid Cymru will be supporting the Conservatives’ motion today because, in principle, we are supportive of the notion of extending eligibility for free bus and rail travel to every person between 16 and 24 years of age in Wales. If you ask young people whether they want to pay to go on a bus or to go for free, well, going for free wins every time. But the budget has to be available in order to achieve this. Therefore, we would urge the Government to look at the Conservatives’ proposals on this, and not to disregard or criticise any policy proposals from opposition parties without even considering them first. Doing otherwise would certainly be immature on the part of the Government and excessively parochial without reason. In looking at the Government’s amendments, in addition to the Government’s consultation document, it looks as though the Government will be introducing something similar over the next few years anyway, so the response of the Government to this Conservative announcement was completely unnecessary.

But we have to remember why we are considering extending these benefits to more young people. Obviously, ensuring that more young people use public transport would bring a number of economic, social and environmental benefits, as we’ve already heard in this debate. But, in substantial areas of Wales where driving is more convenient, public transport is also scarce. We need to enhance the provision of bus services and, ultimately, we need to bring it back to being a public service.

But, in situations and locations where public transport provision is available, it is vital that we discover innovative means of changing behaviour in favour of using public transport. We need buses and trains that are reliable, that reach their destination on time every time, which are clean, which are integrated with other services, and that are linked up together, and that that happens regularly, so we don’t need to spend a large part of every day travelling.

The proposals that we’re debating today are worth considering as one obvious means of reaching this goal of changing behaviour in favour of using public transport, and making it easier for young people to get a job in the first place and to keep that job when they’ve got it. So, I look forward to receiving more information about these possibilities from the Government once the consultation period is completed. Thank you very much.

Encouraging the increased use of public transport must be near the top of any Government’s agenda. The benefits to the environment, economy, public health, are undeniable. Additionally, supporting our young people in accessing employment and education opportunities is essential to the growth and development of our future workforce. Our debate today—

Member of the Senedd:

Will you take an intervention?

I’ve only just started, sorry. Our debate today outlines a realistic, costed and positive policy. Indeed, one might realistically expect the Welsh Government to support this, given that it goes so far in meeting their objectives for young people, outlined in their ‘Prosperity for All’ document, and is a credible alternative to the current system.

Just 15,000 young people aged 16 to 18 have applied for a Welsh Government mytravelpass, out of a total of 113,000. Now, forgive me for thinking there is something wrong with that. That statistic alone says their message isn’t getting through. This is a take-up rate of just 13 per cent, yet the Welsh Government’s current consultation fails to even ask the question about how we can encourage more young people to sign up to the scheme. This is a real concern, because we know that 23 per cent of drivers that are involved in motorised vehicle accidents and 21 per cent of those involved in serious or fatal accidents are aged 24 or under. So, we need to be actively encouraging alternative and greener transport options where possible.

Our proposals to extend free bus travel entitlements to all 16 to 24-year-olds is the simplest, most open and accessible option. Universal eligibility should encourage take-up and, in those areas with our busiest roads, work to reduce congestion and accidents. Additionally, the relief of the burden of transport costs will more relieve the more broad economic challenges faced by our young people here in Wales today. Savings in petrol, insurance, initial car purchases: they actually mount up to a similar figure to a house deposit within a few years for some young people. The average cost of car insurance for a 17-year-old, for example, is now a staggering £2,272 a year. Coupled with this, Welsh workers have the lowest take-home pay of all the home nations, with weekly median wages for 18 to 21-year-olds just 40 per cent of those for 40 to 49-year-olds. Further, the employment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds is considerably lower here than in England and Scotland, and 57,400 people aged 16 to 24 are classed as NEETs—not in employment, education or training.

Now, given that almost 40 per cent of jobseekers say that their job search is limited because of the costs involved, it is clear that access via free bus travel really can make a hugely positive difference here. Eighteen years on from the establishment of this Assembly, Welsh Labour, with the occasional help from Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems, have failed to address the needs of our young people, who face some of the worst employment opportunities in the UK. This policy is clear and immediately effective, and I do urge parties from across this Chamber to support our motion today. Diolch.

Imagine my surprise to see that this Tory debate before the Senedd offered supposed largesse—the same group of Members opposite who support this ideological, obsessive policy of austerity that the Tory UK Government is inflicting on victims with no mercy: the removal, for instance, of housing benefit for 16 and 17-year-olds, and, where they are in power, as in England, removing from those young people the education maintenance allowance that they are now proposing to remove from young people in Wales.

The life chances—16 to 24-year-olds are a generation suffering badly. From the ongoing austerity to zero-hours contracts in the private sector and to a Tory Government in England who are failing to provide more affordable housing, young people across the UK are continuing to pay the price for Tory neglect and failure. Imagine my surprise when I hear that you wish to help the younger generation reach their potential by taking away their education maintenance allowance. It is no wonder that a sighting of a young Tory voter is almost as difficult as finding a Welsh Conservative Assembly Member who believes that Theresa May will lead them into the next election.

But let’s give these proposals a closer inspection. What are they? Well, the economic professors opposite who lecture us on the evils of spending are claiming that they are offering free bus travel and a third off rail fares, as Jeremy Miles has already stated, for all 16 to 24-year-olds at a cost of £25 million. I’m sure that they think that this will make lovely, creative reading as a press release, but I would also say that we must look at the small print, because the devil is always in the detail. This intended funding, as I’ve stated, will be accounted for by scrapping the EMA—helping more than 26,000 students stay in full-time education in Wales and, don’t forget, a lifeline for our most vulnerable young people in danger of falling out of education entirely. That is extremely helping their life chances and its removal would have a devastating impact in Wales if it were allowed, as it is in England.

Indeed, have they actually engaged with students and young people? If I said to you, ‘Free jam tomorrow,’ I think we would want it, but if I said, ‘Free jam tomorrow, but you will lose your education access,’ there’s a different response. The Welsh Government have launched a consultation on potentially extending the age of discounted travel to those aged 24 last week. It is a wide-ranging consultation exercise, as has been stated, and it is aimed at engaging with young people, schools, colleges, organisations and bus companies in order to develop a scheme that is attractive. This consultation runs until 4 January 2018 and looks at a variety of aspects, including which categories of journeys, where there is the age of eligibility and size of discount, and alternative payment methods include fixed contributions per journey or a monthly/annual pass for free travel at the point of use. So, we do have a Welsh Labour Government with a purposeful consultation under way that is not to be completed until January, yet, for some reason, we are now presented with what can only be seen as a cynical attempt by the party opposite to pre-empt it or piggyback it.

So, let’s look at those figures: currently, 15,000 pass holders who will take approximately 1.5 million journeys on buses by March 2018. On the basis of these figures, it can be reasonably assumed that a completely free travel pass would be used by many more people. Assuming an adult bus ticket price is £2 and some 350,000 people would be potentially eligible, the Tory proposal could cost around £70 million for the reimbursement of bus journeys alone. That is almost three times the cost published by the Tories—three times £25 million. This figure only covers the free bus travel part of this scheme and does not factor in the significant additional cost of reimbursing rail operating companies for providing a discount of a third off rail travel costs for 16 to 24-year-olds in Wales.

So, how would the Welsh Tories bridge this huge funding gap between their published £25 million and the £70 million-plus that this scheme would cost in reality, particularly given the devastating effect that their party’s ongoing austerity is continuing to have on budgets? The Welsh Tories are advocating a plan with a damning economic incoherence that would cause ‘spreadsheet Phil’ to blush. Yet they continue to lecture the rest of us that they are masters of economic competence. Not even Alec Douglas-Home with his matchsticks could make these Welsh Tory figures up. So, as such, I will be supporting the amendments to the motion proposed by the Welsh Government, instead of the fantastic and fantasy economics of the Welsh Tories. Diolch.

Will you forgive me for beginning by saying ‘purposeful consultation’ is perhaps just a little bit late for a Government whose last scheme collapsed so spectacularly and which, of course, affected my constituency? The first thing I want to speak about is those constituents. My region pretty much follows the boundaries of the old West Glamorgan authority, which, back in the mists of time and evidence and documentation that is apparently far too expensive for the local authority to disclose these days, introduced a tertiary college education policy that remains influential to this day. Neath Port Talbot borough council is still following that policy. With two exceptions, based on language and religion, post-16 education is provided by a handful of further education colleges, and a merger with Powys FE not so very long ago means that some of that offer now extends well beyond the local authority boundary. That might mean that young people have perhaps a good choice of post-16 education, but it’s in a small number of centralised campuses, which extend into mid Wales and are separated by considerable distances. So, by definition, these aren’t local for most people, and in my experience, getting up early to travel considerable distances is a pretty unattractive proposal for some young people, if my house is anything to go by, and it’s even more unattractive if the cost of the bus to college is not the priority spend from the EMA if they have it, or indeed other money if they don’t have it. Colleges were telling us, not so very long ago, that their hardship funds were being swallowed up—and this is during the EMA period—by childcare and travel costs, leaving nothing left for meeting other demands, and if the direction that Wales is going in is to centralise provision for further education colleges, then our green card policy would mitigate those two connected pressures.

My second point is about Welsh language post-16 provision, and again I look at Neath Port Talbot: one Welsh language sixth form, situated right at the top of the Swansea valley, miles from the main areas of population. I think you’d have to be pretty dedicated to get there if you live in somewhere like Port Talbot, and support for travel is not particularly well guaranteed. The tertiary colleges are nowhere yet ready for providing an immersive Welsh language environment. I think our green card could help the Welsh Government meet its target of a million Welsh speakers by not choking off supply to that sixth form, by not making cost a reason for a young person to choose a college that may be nearer, and by not making it easier to leave your Welsh behind.

My third point is about the view that young people have of themselves, and I think this is pretty important. David Melding started to talk about it in the last debate, actually. I think it goes without saying that the population’s use of public transport, especially reduced diesel, will result in less air and noise pollution, as well as having less congestion on the roads. While many of our young people, especially those 16-year-olds that our green card would benefit—. Well, they don’t drive yet. So, encouraging them to use buses and trains more helps embed the idea that they don’t need to rely on expensive cars in the future. Congestion is just going to slow down their road journeys if they reach for the car keys anyway, so encouraging that public-transport-friendly population through the use of the green card works on two health levels, the first being about air quality with fewer cars, or fewer idling cars—it’s the same thing really.

But the second, and perhaps less obvious point is that in using public transport, you do end up walking and cycling more. Even if you have to walk to the end of your street to catch a bus, that’s further than walking to the car parked outside your house. In 2009, the World Health Organization found that one of the best ways of encouraging greater physical activity generally was through transport policy, and the Welsh Conservatives’ green card feeds into this in a really obvious way, because public transport journeys will require some footfall or cycling travel, at least one end of that journey. Countries where the population make a higher proportion of trips by walking, cycling or public transport—I’m sure we’ve heard this before—have lower rates of obesity. And also—although this may not actually be the strongest argument in Wales, I suspect—sunlight exposes us to vitamin D, which, in turn, leads to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers.

And then, just to finish, on the area of health, but more importantly wider well-being, it does matter how young people become confident and how they don’t limit their own horizons. Young people currently have to buy a railcard to get cheaper travel, or they perhaps get a deal when they go to university when they open a student bank account. I just did a quick ask around locally before this debate, last week, and found that Swansea students don’t just use their cards to go home. They take some chances to go places and make contacts, which lead to work opportunities, new networks, trips that some of them would not have considered without the discount. University College London also found that discounted travel cards were not always taken up because even a one-off payment can be unaffordable at that time. So, that’s one small barrier closing off all that opportunity for those already best placed to take it. I think all our people need that opportunity—not just students—and our free green card makes it just that bit easier to seize that opportunity.

Thank you very much. I now call on the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure, Ken Skates.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’d like to thank all Members in the Chamber for their contributions today in what is becoming a very much transport-related set of debates. Before I respond to comments specifically about bus services, I’d like to add my name to the list of car enthusiasts and say that Wales is in a prime position to take advantage of emerging technologies, particularly in electric and hydrogen powertrains. In fact, I’m a classic car enthusiast, and I’m pleased to say that it’s now possible to convert your petrol-driven classic car to an electric powertrain, thanks to a service that actually exists here in Wales, Dragon Electric Vehicles, right at the forefront of developing electric engines for existing vehicles. We are right at the forefront of research and of development and of implementing new ways of powering vehicles.

Moving back to bus services, and particularly bus services for young people, I think it’s abundantly clear from this debate that we all wish to see more young people using local bus services. We want people to use them more regularly, not just for environmental benefits, but also, as Suzy Davies highlighted, for wider social and well-being benefits, for better connecting communities and, crucially, enabling people to better connect with other human beings. And so, it’s the objective of this Government, and it’s something that we are keen to encourage for the well-being of existing and, indeed, future generations.

The Llywydd took the Chair.

Since April of this year, young people have made over 0.5 million trips using their mytravelpass and, today, there are more than 17,000 pass holders. I accept that that proportion, the uptake, is not as high as we would wish it to be, and so the challenge is to encourage even more young people to do the same, to enhance our discounted bus travel scheme for younger people, and to make it easier for an entire generation to travel by bus. Last week, I was delighted to make good on our promise to consult on how a new Welsh Government scheme to be introduced in April of next year can best encourage more young people on to our buses. And I’d like to emphasise the point that was raised by Jeremy Miles: that it’s absolutely vital that those who stand to gain the most from any discounted travel scheme are at the heart of any decision that we make. The consultation on discounted bus travel for younger people in Wales aims to capture the views of young people, of schools, of community groups, of colleges, and of bus companies on a scheme that is both attractive and affordable—one that can practically support people in their life, in their work and in their study.

The consultation document invites comments about maintaining the existing provision or extending the scope of the current scheme to include, potentially, an increase in the upper age limit, increasing the level of discount, replacing the current reimbursement arrangement with a charge per journey, which is something that we see in many parts of Europe, and also on introducing a monthly or annual fee so as to retain free journeys at the point of travel. The consultation also considers extending the scheme to apprentices, only some of whom are currently eligible under existing arrangements. It also looks at potentially extending the scheme to volunteers, to carers, to recipients of education maintenance allowance and to all young people in further education. And I do recognise the benefits of such a scheme to many other people who actively contribute to society or who need assistance when embarking on a new career but who currently fall outside the age of eligibility. That’s why I’m particularly keen to explore what appetite there is for extending the age of discounted travel up to 24-year-olds, potentially allowing us to help more young people to make the most of bus travel right across Wales. The scheme, to be introduced in April 2018, will be one that best reflects the needs and preferences of our young people and helps further boost bus travel as an option. That’s essential if we are to create a sustainable bus network for the future.

In the current financial year, we have set aside up to £1 million to support the one third discount scheme. Any enhancement of the scheme can be expected to result in increased costs for compensating bus operators under what would continue to be a voluntary arrangement. Operators, though, who wish to be eligible for bus services support grant funding must offer the discount. The existing legislation, of course, means that we cannot make a younger persons’ discounted bus travel scheme mandatory, other than for 16 to 18-year-olds in full-time education, and I am very much sympathetic to the point that my colleague Jeremy Miles made regarding this matter.

I also welcome Jeremy Miles’s offer of a calculator to those Members who possess a broken abacus. His and Rhiannon Passmore’s forensic analysis of the Conservatives’ proposals I think demonstrates that there is a titanic hole in the numbers. I’ll outline again the reasons why those figures don’t stack up. Based on a 50 per cent uptake across the 16 to 24-year-old cohort, the cost would more likely be £78 million or upwards. That’s based on 50 per cent uptake. Now, we know that the Conservatives support our view that there should be more young people on the buses, so assuming an uptake, perhaps, of 100 per cent, which I’m sure everybody would like to see, that figure would rise to more than £150 million. Yet their budget of £25 million would allow for an uptake of just 16 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds. In turn, that would equate to approximately 17,700 16 to 18-year-olds; ironically, the very same uptake figure that the Conservatives were so critical of.

However, I do congratulate the Conservatives for entering this debate in a very co-operative manner. I think it’s very helpful that they have tabled this debate today to highlight just how much this Welsh Government has done and intends to do to support young people across all of our communities. To expect every young person, though, to forego the benefits of a car for all their journeys I think everybody in this Chamber would appreciate is probably unrealistic. But it is entirely realistic, Presiding Officer, for many young people to use the bus for more of their journeys, and I hope that many young people whose only experience of bus travel is the daily trip to and from school will take advantage of the new scheme to try the bus for other reasons, and having done so, they’ll see that today’s buses provide a really attractive offer.

Whilst reducing the cost of travel for young people is a priority to encourage use, I appreciate that it’s only part of the solution. Providing a bus product that is attractive and also efficient is equally essential, and anyone who has used a bus recently, I think, will recognise that the vast majority of vehicles on our roads offer a clean, comfortable and well-equipped environment. Yet unfortunately there remains an incorrect impression that buses are somehow a poorer relation to the private motor car. If this were ever the case, it is most certainly no longer true.

I’ve asked the Confederation of Passenger Transport, representing the bus industry, to develop proposals for a marketing campaign to publicise and promote today’s bus network, and subject to their proposals, I would hope to match-fund their financial contribution to any such campaign in order to drive up patronage. The new scheme I plan to introduce in April will be a better, more attractive means of encouraging younger people to use the bus for more of their journeys. The current scheme has made a good start, but we need to do more if we are to change attitudes.

Members will be aware of the bus summit that I held in January, and I’m pleased to say that a number of workshops are taking place this autumn to consider how best we can improve the passenger experience at bus stops by providing improved facilities and consistent passenger information; how we can also develop funding solutions that offer greater stability to the bus industry in Wales; and how we can deliver an integrated transport system that provides improved accessibility and ticketing solutions fit for the twenty-first century. This is our ambition, and it’s what we want to deliver. Thank you.

I call on Darren Millar to reply to the debate.

Diolch, Llywydd. Can I thank everybody who has taken part in what, for the best part, has been a very good and decent debate on all sides of the Chamber? We’re bringing these proposals forward today because we believe that they offer an exciting opportunity to do something different in Wales that’s not been done in any other part of the UK, and that is to offer our 16 to 24-year-olds the opportunity to travel on the public transport network free of charge, on our bus network. At the moment, of course, we extend those privileges to the over-60s and to other vulnerable and special groups like injured servicemen and women, and we know that that has been extremely successful. It has been something that has been supported by all political parties. I want to extend similar privileges to our young people, because I believe that they also deserve a fair deal. Our green card proposals are good for young people. As you’ve already heard from the speakers in this debate, they’re good for the environment, they’re good for public transport, particularly in rural areas, where we’ve seen bus routes scrapped because of a lack of commercial viability, they’re good for public health, and they’re good for people’s social well-being.

Will you take an intervention?

I will explain where I’m at with costings in a second, if you’ll sit down please, because I think it’s really important that the one significant objection that some Members seem to have is around the funding. So, let me go into a little bit of detail on our funding and how we’ve costed these proposals. First of all, can I just say that your suggestion, Rhianon Passmore, about the fact that if we scrap EMA it’s going to push up the number of people who are not in education, employment or training is wrong, because, actually, Wales has a higher rate of NEETs than England, which does not have EMA at all? You mentioned, Jeremy Miles, about the fact that 26,000 people currently benefit from EMA, and you’re absolutely right, but our proposals would benefit 360,000, not just 26,000, and as you will know from speaking to individuals in your own constituency, EMA awards can be extremely divisive amongst young people in educational establishments, and there’s a divide between those who get it and those who don’t.

So, let me just explain why I think this is an affordable policy. Your costings, Cabinet Secretary, have been based on the mytravelpass scheme that currently operates, which, frankly, is an extraordinarily expensive scheme. I cannot see how it is costing the Welsh taxpayer quite so much money. For the figures for the financial year to 2017, there were 15,000—. There were 9,000—just let me get the figures here—there were 9,250 beneficiaries of that scheme at a cost of £9.743 million. That means that the cost of mytravelpass per beneficiary is £1,053 a year. Now, in anybody’s mind, that’s extraordinarily expensive: £1,053 per year to get a third off your bus passes, when you can actually buy a bus pass for a whole year in my area for £490 a year at a commercial price. I think that’s an extraordinarily expensive scheme and I’m yet to see any explanation as to why it’s costing the Welsh taxpayer quite that much. [Interruption.] I’m very happy to take an intervention.

As the Member will be aware, it’s based on a no better, no worse-off scenario, and therefore the reimbursement is based on the amount of trips that a young person will make. Now, your scheme, as you’ve proposed, would supposedly cost just £25 million, and yet it would apply to 350,000 people. I mean, cost per person would be just £71 per year. I’m not sure how many journeys that would buy at a day’s adult rate, but I don’t think it’s many, and it’s certainly less than the 200 journeys that are expected to be made with the introduction of such a scheme.

I’m grateful for the Cabinet Secretary for clarifying why his scheme is so expensive, because what he will also know is that the other scheme that is operated by the Welsh Government, the concessionary fare scheme, is much less expensive—much, much less expensive indeed. In fact, it’s less than £100 per beneficiary for older people who get their free bus passes. And I understand the difficulty that the Welsh Government has in trying to justify spending £1,000 per beneficiary on a third off a bus ticket, when, actually, you can buy them over the counter for £490—and you’d be better off giving a grant directly to the individuals concerned, frankly, because it would cost you an awful lot less—but the reality is that if we’re able to afford this for older people, we can afford it for our younger people too. Surely they’re worth just as much to society as older people.

Now, we have based our figures on the costs of the existing concessionary fare scheme, and the existing spending within that scheme. The cost per head of beneficiaries, as I’ve already said, is well under £100 per year, and if we extend that scheme to 16 to 24-year-olds, then we know that not all of those 16 to 24-year-olds are going to take up the opportunity, as is the case with older people. So, at the moment, everybody who’s over 60 is eligible to be part of the concessionary fare scheme, but only 70-odd per cent of people actually take up the opportunity to participate in that scheme. We believe that younger people would choose: some people would want to take up the opportunity to get their free bus passes, others wouldn’t. And we actually expect around two thirds of the rate that older people have taken up, so just over half of the young people who would be eligible. So, that’s how we’ve arrived at our costs. We also know that you can buy commercially priced national railcards for young people, the young person’s railcard, for less than £15 on a regular basis: £14.99 I saw them advertised for—£15—last week. The usual price is £30, but they’re regularly discounted. Now, I would hope that the Welsh Government could use its buying power for 360,000 16 to 24-year-olds to get some sort of extra discount on that price in order to encourage young people to take up the opportunity to use the rail network at a discounted fare price. So, that’s where we’ve got our figures, and I’m happy to share them with you in the same way that I have now. We’ve even thrown a little bit in—on top of funding the bus passes and on top of funding the railcard discount, we’ve even thrown a bit in for promotion, because you haven’t done enough in terms of promoting your current scheme now, which is why we’ve got a paltry 15 per cent—15 per cent—of 16 to 18-year-olds actually receiving and taking part in the mytravelpass scheme.

Now, you’ve already heard that, for young people, this is a big issue. It’s one of the top priorities, as Paul Davies and Jeremy Miles acknowledged. The cost of transport is a barrier to people being able to get to their place of education, it’s a barrier to them getting a job interview, let alone getting to and from work. So, we need to do something about this. We’ve come up with a solution, we’ve presented that solution, we’re trying to do it in a non-partisan way, and it’s a shame that some people who have spoken in this debate have tried to make it a very partisan debate completely unnecessarily. So, we’ve got a realistic, fully costed solution to the travel woes of young people across Wales, and we want to encourage you, Cabinet Secretary, to seriously consider taking these plans forward, because I tell you what, it would make a huge difference to young people across Wales.

My daughter has just passed her driving test—I’m very proud of her. She’s just passed her driving test first time, unlike her dad, and the cost of her insurance is absolutely extortionate—over £1,600 a year. And let me tell you, she’s not driving a flash car; it’s a small, tiny, poky little car. So, when you consider the cost to young people of being able to be a motorist in the current time, you can see why our proposal would give them another alternative. It would encourage them to take up the opportunity to use public transport, would help those bus routes stay sustainable, would encourage them to get out and see their friends and to see some of what Wales has to offer, and would enable them to get backwards and forwards to their place of education or work.

Will you take an intervention?

I will take an intervention from you.

Thank you. In terms of, as has been stated, improving the life chances, well-being and potential of young people, how do you see factoring in the side of the coin whereby you are going to get rid of the education maintenance allowance to pay for this wonderful proposed policy?

Well, I thought I’d spelled that out, but just to repeat myself, because you clearly weren’t listening: the education maintenance allowance does not achieve its stated aims. The education maintenance allowance was scrapped in England and they have lower levels of those not in education, employment or training—in fact, record low levels of NEETs—in England, whereas Wales’s rate is much higher, proportionally, of 16 to 18-year-olds. As I said, I think using that money—it’s also very divisive. Using that money and giving 360,000 young people the opportunity to benefit, rather than 26,000, is a much better use of taxpayers’ money, and that’s why I hope, Cabinet Secretary, that you’ll take forward our proposals.

The proposal is to agree the motion without amendment. Does any Member object? [Objection.] I will defer voting under this item until voting time.

Voting deferred until voting time.