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.