6. Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport: Active Travel Integrated Network Maps

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:49 pm on 27 February 2018.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 5:49, 27 February 2018

It's good that you now have all these plans from local authorities, but I hope we're now going to see some action at pace. As Dai Lloyd's already said, there is a huge public health benefit from this and we have to take heart from people like Professor Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the UK Government, who warns that air pollution is more harmful to children in cars than those walking on the street. This is a message that we somehow have to get across to parents—that actually they're putting their children at risk more by taking them to school in the car than they are by walking with them or encouraging them to walk on their own or with their friends. 

In my day, I used to have to wait around the corner to pick my kids up from secondary school, if I had to pick them up to take them somewhere after school, because it was simply not cool to be seen with your parents. At what point are we going to stop taking our kids to school? Are we going to be taking them to work? Somehow, the infantilisation of young people—they could be operating independently and deciding which route they're going to take home and which child they're going to walk home with et cetera. So, we really, really do have to labour this point: it is nine to 12 times higher—the pollution inside the car than outside it. In a place like Cardiff, that is very significant because Cardiff has such high levels of air pollution. We know that the Welsh Government has admitted that our current plans for resolving this are illegal. I wonder what consideration you've given to implementing a clear air zone for Cardiff, because we really do need to move forward at pace. 

I'm very interested in the fact that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence says that off-road cycle routes are very good value for money with every £1 invested returning £14 in benefits. Investing in walking infrastructure has a £37 return for every £1 invested—no doubt, referring back to some of the statistics that Dr Dai Lloyd has given us.

If you're in search of money for implementing these excellent schemes, I wondered whether you might consider the additional funding that could be raised by having a levy on city-centre car parking, because in Cardiff alone I have estimated that a 100 per cent levy on a two-hour charge on all the city centre parking could raise £1 billion. You could introduce an awful lot of walking and cycling routes with that sort of money. So, I'd be very interested to know what consideration you've given to this sort of thing, because we have the roads already—we don't need to build more roads, we just need to use them for different purposes. We need to use dedicated routes for walking and cycling. 

Lastly, I wondered if you could just tell us, for those submissions that fell short of your expectations, which you nevertheless decided to approve with recommendations for addressing weaknesses, what action you are going to be taking to ensure that those weaknesses are addressed.