I'm very pleased that we're debating air quality in the National Assembly today, and I'd like to take us from the general to the particular, and a journey down Sandy Road in Llanelli. This is the road, for those of you not familiar with the area, leading out of Llanelli towards Burry Port and Kidwelly. Along that road are two schools—Coleg Sir Gâr and Ysgol y Strade—and along it is another school just up Denham Avenue, Ysgol Gymraeg Ffwrnes. It is the main thoroughfare out of Llanelli, in Burry Port there are now continued housing developments and smack along the middle of the road is the massive new Parc y Strade housing development on the site of the old Scarlets rugby ground.

This is an area that already has harmful levels of nitrogen dioxide, and the situation is getting worse. It is an air quality management area, and the residents are getting increasingly desperate about the build-up of traffic in this area. It is an unpleasant place to walk, it is an unpleasant place to live and, through repeated actions, we are compounding the problem rather than alleviating it.

To me, Sandy Road is a classic case study in the policy dilemma that we face, the disjointed approach that we're taking to this project, the prioritisation of short-term needs and the lack of long-term thinking—precisely what we designed the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 to tackle. This is an example of where such future thinking is desperately needed, because had it been applied in the past, we wouldn't be in this situation now.

I feel desperately sorry for the people on Sandy Road, and I understand their frustration—I understand as well that they're trying to come up with solutions. Sadly, I think many of the solutions will just add to the problem that we've been discussing here this afternoon.

Ray Jones, who lives along Sandy Road, is a doughty campaigner on these issues, and he's pointed out the impact just of creating the new Ysgol Gymraeg Ffwrnes without proper measures to encourage people not to take their cars to drop their children off. He's cited an incident recently where a car knocked into a pram, because, as we know from all schools in our constituencies, there is gridlock outside schools in the morning. His solution, and the solution of nearly 2,000 people who've signed a petition, is to create a bypass along Sandy Road. Again, for those of you who don't know it, the suggested route would be over the Sandy Water Park housing development, which is only some 300m away from the main road, and which is one of the most tranquil areas in the area with lovely nature and close to where two National Eisteddfods were held, where it was rightly complimented as a beautiful place to hold the festival in Llanelli.

So, whilst I understand the desire to alleviate the bottleneck that we have created on Sandy Road, creating an expensive road—we know that roads on average cost £20 million per mile—over an area of tranquility where there is an existing housing development will, I think, not solve the problem; it would simply shift it. I know from speaking to air quality experts at Swansea University—they think, given the location of this likely new road so close to houses and where wind would blow the particulates likely back towards Sandy Road, this would not solve the air quality problem either. 

But these are the sort of desperate measures that people are forced to think about, because we're offering them no alternative. And this is the problem I face when I speak to Ray Jones and other residents in the areas. I understand the problem. I don't think this short-term fix would solve this, but what else are we offering people in this situation? They don't believe, frankly, promises of better public transport in the longer term; they think it won't be delivered. And just as we've heard the case made for a bypass in Llandeilo recently on air quality grounds, people want something tangible that is going to solve the problem in the short term.

This is the political leadership dilemma we face in this National Assembly. It is easier for the quick fix than it is the long-term solution. The evidence is plentiful of what we need to do to change this, and Jenny Rathbone before me has touched upon much of that. We need to have behaviour change and we need to invest in alternatives to car use, and stop building houses in areas where there is poor public transport, and put in improvements as part of that. Carmarthenshire County Council have come up with an air quality management area plan that simply talks about possibilities; they don't talk about actions. We're kicking the can down the road constantly, leaving it to future generations. So, I'd ask the Minister to tell us, while we're asking these authorities to set out these plans, what the consequences are for breaching levels of harmful pollution.

It is time that we tackled the causes, not the consequences. We need a whole-scale review into what has worked elsewhere in the UK and abroad to improve air quality, and we must simply, simply stop monitoring failure and start modelling success. Diolch.