I will be supporting the motion before us today on community transport, which has been tabled by individual Members, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to speak to it. I don't intend to rehearse the entire motion, but I do want to emphasise the opening point: 

'that the National Assembly for Wales

'1. Notes that community transport services play a vital role in our communities, providing transport for people who face barriers to accessing public and private transport, supporting people to live independently and access vital services, while also mitigating issues around loneliness and isolation.'

Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire is a rural community and encompasses a population that has areas of significant deprivation and a population that is significantly older than the Welsh average. Without community transport, so many of my constituents would struggle to access medical appointments, struggle to get their shopping done and struggle to engage with friends and family. I absolutely recognise the innovative and collaborative thinking that my local community transport providers offer, and I would ask that the Welsh Government recognise the vital role that they play.

I have three key areas I want to highlight today. Firstly, that value to our communities. There is a recognition that loneliness and isolation is not only a great social ill, but also on the increase. Communities are more fractured, families more disparate, and people, older people in particular, can be left behind. We have those who have never had strong support networks and those whose networks have dissolved with the passage of time. For many of these people, the lifeline that is community transport really is their only point of contact with the world and is their only enabler.

For example, in Pembrokeshire, Country Cars runs a service that not only relies on the use of volunteers' cars, but also has funded and run successful vehicles able to take a wheelchair user and their partner or carer, like the terminally ill gentleman whose bucket list consisted of desperately wanting to see his grandson play cricket—just down the road, but he had no other way to get there; or the isolated, severely disabled young man who was able to borrow one of the accessible cars for the weekend and went, with his two carers, to Swansea to see a favourite band and have the chance to be like young people throughout the country.

Another outstanding initiative funded by the National Lottery is Bus Buddies, a system where people are able to not only call a bus to their door to facilitate their ability to get out and about, but can have someone with them. But, of course, the sad reality is that for a substantial number of people, the driver who drops them off on a Friday will be the last person they see until that driver reappears the following Tuesday. Nobody—absolutely nobody—knocks on a great many doors, which is a sad indictment of our society, and why we should be so very grateful to the volunteers of organisations such as Bus Buddies or the Bloomfield centre dial-a-ride, or County Cars.

The second area I would like to highlight are the reasons as to why we've become so very reliant on this band of voluntary organisations, and the enormous pressures they find themselves under. Cabinet Secretary, there are three principal strategic documents that the Welsh Government have used to set out transport and community policies: 'Prosperity for All', the new economic action plan and the Welsh Government budget. And, to be frank, Cabinet Secretary, I find them to be incoherent, uncoordinated, and divorced from the front-line, day-to-day reality we see on the ground. 

In the first of these, the budget document, Welsh Labour has initiated over £100 million-worth of cuts. Welsh Labour have comprehensively failed to build a comprehensive public transport system. Congestion on our roads is crippling our economy. The rail network is staggering under 15 years of Welsh Labour mismanagement of the rail franchise, and bus services have been completely decimated over the past decade. Cumulatively, these policy and delivery failings have created horrendous and unfair pressure on community-based transport services. Community transport has also had to step up to the plate because the number of registered bus services operating in Wales has decreased dramatically in recent years. A total of 53 bus services were reduced, altered or withdrawn in 2015-16 alone. We're all concerned about the potential impacts the Department of Transport outcomes might have on the consultation, which is why, Cabinet Secretary, I'll be interested to hear what contingency plans you might have to mitigate any impact on transport provision through minibus services.

My final and very quick area of concern, Deputy Presiding Officer, is the sustainability of these worthwhile services, given that there's a diminishing pool of volunteers and an ever-increasing demand for services. People are working later in life, they have more pulls on their time, and yet there's an increasing demand for community transport services because of the failures of Welsh Government. And I would be interested to know, Cabinet Secretary, how you intend to address those failures.