There's a danger that this apparent consensus gives the impression that this is going to be easy, but I'd like to remind you that the car lobby is really powerful, and if we are going to do anything about this, we are going to have to face down the car lobby. I very much welcome the vigour—and, I hope, rigour—with which the new environment Minister is pursuing this important issue, and we now need action, not words. 

If we look at how all other modes of transport have been strangled by the dominance of the car: in the early 1950s, 42 per cent of journeys were taken by bus, and that's down to five per cent today, even though this is, obviously, the only mode of transport for most of our poorest citizens. Cycling: 11 per cent in 1952; 1 per cent today. And the car: 27 per cent in the early 1950s, and now over 80 per cent of journeys are taken by car. So, we have a huge problem that is fuelled by the fiscal and transport policies that have been going on for generations. The cost of a car becomes cheaper and cheaper, whilst rail and bus fares continue to rise and rise. In the last five years alone, rail fares have gone up 15 per cent, bus and taxi fares up 14 per cent, and the cost of running a car has decreased by 5 per cent. Little chance of change from the UK Government, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer has yet again frozen the climate change fuel levy, and today we learned that train fares next year will see the largest hike in five years. And all this while wages are stagnant, so it can't be any surprise, really, that four in five commuters into Cardiff—over 60,000 people every day—travel to work by car.

Building more roads just leads to more people shifting to commuting by car. So, the investment we have to make is in better public transport, in increasing our rail capacity, delivering on the metro, and delivering better and more buses in the meantime, which must go hand in hand with tough measures to address this problem well before 2040. Because we have to acknowledge that the reason that this is such a huge public health issue is because one fifth of all cases of low birth weight babies is due to traffic-related air pollution, with the greatest harm occurring in early pregnancy, before women realise they're even pregnant. We think that maternal exposure to benzo[a]pyrene, which is generated by diesel engines, is linked to mental health problems in children and neurocognitive delay. The level of nitrogen dioxide in Cardiff and Vale residential areas, being the highest in Wales—we know that that is linked to an increased risk of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Above all, we need to get across to parents doing what is colloquially called 'the school run' that we need to listen to Professor Sir David King, the former Government chief scientific adviser, who says:

'Children sitting in the backseat of vehicles are likely to be exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution...If more drivers knew the damage they could be doing to their children, I think they'd think twice about getting in the car.'

People are not hearing this message at the moment, and we can see the evidence cluttered around practically all of our primary schools, where people are obviously living within easy walking distance of the school because, otherwise, they wouldn't be able to go that school.

We know the benefit of exercise in improving people's concentration at school, yet we still have the situation we have. It isn't children who need persuading, it's adults. In Cardiff and Vale, a quarter of all adults are inactive, according to the director of public health; that is, they take less than half and hour's physical exercise a week—they just move from the sofa to the car to the desk and back again.

So, we need a massive public education drive to persuade people to do short journeys of less than 2 km—just over a mile—by walking or cycling. We need to get tough with local authorities that fail to implement the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013. We don't need more legislation—we just need to implement the legislation we've got.

We know that imposing congestion zones—for example, in London—has led to an 80 per cent increase in people using bicycles. So, I think that there's a really clear indicator of what we need to do. We just need to get on and do it.