Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House – in the Senedd at 2:49 pm on 16 May 2018.
Yes. A large part of that is actually in the portfolio of my colleague, the Cabinet Secretary, who is also here to hear what you've got to say, but I think I did go through a lot of it yesterday. Just to be clear, one of the big problems we have in terms of giving you concrete things that I've done, is that it's not actually devolved. We have a fundamental disagreement with a Government of your colour in the UK about whether this is infrastructure or not. The mobile phone operators, I'm very well aware, will tell you that all they need is to be able to build bigger masts and everything will be fine. But I don't want to see, and nor do most of the people of Wales, a forest of masts right through the national park, because they can't be brought to share those masts and infrastructure, or indeed use the Home Office masts instead. So, there is a real balance here between the number of masts necessary in order to ensure there's competition in something that ought to be an infrastructure and ensuring the coverage for Wales, and actually people behaving sensibly in sensible areas.
As I said, this is a commercial imperative by them, so what they're basically saying to me is they want me to get my Cabinet colleague to allow them to build any size mast they like, anywhere they like, and take all of the tariffs away that they have to pay to go there, and then they'll build a whole network right across Wales. Well, I'm sorry, that doesn't stack up in business terms. We've asked them for the evidence to show why the current charging regime makes such a difference to their commercial case, and why they can't share, and why they won't allow roaming, and I'm afraid the evidence we've had back has not been good. So, we've gone out again to do that. At the same time, we're out to consultation on 'Planning Policy Wales'—that's about to come in—and we're about to consult on changes to the permitted development regime. But it will not be a free-for-all, because that's not what the people of Wales have indicated to us, in any consultation, they actually want.