I welcome the opportunity to contribute in this debate, and I congratulate the lead speaker on bringing forward such an interesting and dynamic policy document, which seeks to address many of the posed questions that we, as elected Members, get from our constituents if we represent cities like Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, or indeed our larger towns such as Newtown, Wrexham, or Barry as well. Because, actually, a lot of the thinking in this document doesn't necessarily have to be exclusively in the urban area; it can carry into our larger towns and our market towns the length and breadth of Wales. One thing that jumps at you straight away when you read the foreword to the document is that nearly 70 per cent of the population of Wales now live in an urban area. 'Define "urban area" and discuss', you could say, but most people have an image of Wales—and rightly so have an image of Wales—as a green and pleasant land, because the vast majority of Welsh land is green and pleasant. But, when you put it on a population basis, this affects a huge number of our countrymen and women who are looking to their politicians to alleviate the blight of many poor decisions that have been taken by previous generations, especially in town planning, especially in the brutality of the 1960s and 1970s, where concrete jungles were created and the solutions that we today say should be put in place for transport measures were just completely discarded, when there was far greater scope to clear sites and create that urban space, that liveability, that David talked about in his opening remarks that we now should grab the mantle of and actually drive forward.

I do think that it is incumbent on the current Welsh Government, and on all political parties, to come up with the solutions and come up with the route-map that this document clearly identifies as, certainly, the Welsh Conservatives' offer to many of these pertinent questions and, indeed, timeline the solutions that you'll put in place, because the document maps out a timeline between 2025 and 2040 of when we, as Welsh Conservatives, would very much like to see a lot of these policies in place to make the difference. Let's not forget that we are falling behind because of the metro mayors and the city mayors in England, right along Offa's Dyke, from Bristol up to Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham in between—a lot of the city mayors' electability at the ballot box is to make these big improvements, both economically and environmentally, in the city cultures that they preside over now. It's not a central Government policy now to deliver most of these initiatives on the ground; it is for those metro mayors and city mayors to do that.

So, the Welsh Government really does have to get to grips with devolving responsibilities out to our urban areas so that they can utilise the dynamics of the local economy and the local solutions that can be put in place for some of the quick and early wins that we need to achieve, and then the more long-term solutions that need to be put in place with a more joined-up planning system. Time and time again, when I look at the planning environment around Cardiff, which I've had the pleasure to represent in this Chamber now for nearly 12 years—. It's not exclusively Cardiff; the Member for Llanelli touched on the point in his intervention a little earlier about 'what about the outlying areas?' You only need to drive up the A40 in the morning to see the commute into Cardiff, and then drive the other way back and see the commute out of Cardiff, to show that the cities are the engine for growth for the wider region that encompasses that area. So, we must have a planning system that isn't fit for the 1950s and the 1960s, but is fit for the twenty-first century and the third decade that we're going into now of that twenty-first century.

I've sat in this Chamber over the last 12 years and heard various planning Ministers, from the wonderful debates and statements that we used to get from my namesake, Andrew Davies, and the spatial planning—whatever the thing was called. It used to torment us, to be honest with you, the amount of debates that we used to have.