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.