5. Welsh Conservatives Debate: Urban Renewal

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:08 pm on 6 June 2018.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Gareth Bennett Gareth Bennett UKIP 3:08, 6 June 2018

Yes, the point was made by Simon Thomas earlier, and I would agree that the biggest danger is caused by the cars. I think the point I'm making is that the three different things don't really mix at all. Cars, cycles, pedestrians, the difficulty is trying to find a viable way of cyclists and pedestrians becoming more active and using that mode of transport without everything interfering with the other thing. So, this, I do find, is a genuine difficulty as a pedestrian. I know you cycle a lot, Jenny, so I'm trying to look at it from the perspective of a pedestrian. So, I think there is a difficulty. I think the problem is: where is the space for all of these different modes of transport to be viably promoted?

A major issue is that there are now too many cars on the road. Our current towns and cities were not designed for this amount of cars, so we do need to reduce the number of cars on the road, which takes us on to one of the Conservatives' ideas, which is about encouraging the use of buses, which, again, Oscar was describing in his contribution.

There is a proposal to make transport free for 16 to 24-year-olds on the buses. This would be a bold move. I can see that this might lead to a culture change, and it's worth thinking about this. In the long term, there could be a massive theoretical gain. The problem is, in the short term, what would be the budgetary cost to the Welsh Government of providing this kind of facility. Such a move, if it was made, could encourage many young people not to use cars all the time. It won't encourage all of them, because some of them won't envisage using buses because buses are not cool. The ones that do use the proposed bus cards, these cards will also encourage them to walk from their homes to the bus stop, so it could also encourage the idea of walking, because at the moment a lot of youngsters are only interested in walking, unfortunately, from the couch to the car parked outside the house. Within a few short years, many of these same youngsters could be obese and will be a drain on the NHS, so we do have to look at the long-term potential cost savings. Surely, this is the kind of long-term thinking that tends to be encouraged by our future generations commissioner, so I wonder what she would think about your policy of free bus travel for the young. I wonder, of course, what the Government Minister has to say about it today. Of course, we also need to cost this and think about how on earth it would be funded.

I think I've come to the end of my time. There was a lot of stuff to cover. We broadly agree with the Conservatives; on the Plaid amendments, the one about clean air we do support. We know you're doing a lot of Government initiatives, but we do wonder about the effectiveness of them, because the active travel Act, there are lots of doubts about how effective it is, so we are opposing your amendments today. Diolch yn fawr iawn.