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.