Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:19 pm on 6 June 2018.
That's a fantastic idea. I hadn't appreciated that, but I'll get onto that immediately, because one of the problems we have in Cardiff is that we've got over 1,000 city centre parking places, which is obviously allowing people to do absolutely the wrong thing. They should be coming in on public transport or park and ride, rather than trying to park in the middle of the city centre; it's absolutely crazy. Clearly, there needs to be parking for the people who reside in those flats, but they are very small in number.
I wanted to just talk a little bit about the eco-town planning policy that was launched by the last UK Labour Government in 2008, which was designed to provide both additional housing and mitigate and adapt to climate change. Unfortunately, tragically, the coalition Government that succeeded it tore this up—the famous codicil to the autumn statement in 2015 by George Osborne, where he slipped through abandoning the zero-carbon building regulations that we could otherwise be enjoying today. I do hope that the Welsh Government will look seriously at introducing this so that we're not having to retrofit the houses that we're building tomorrow with further environmental cladding when we shouldn't have allowed them to build at such poor quality in the first place.
I think, three years after that disaster, there are several towns around the UK that are looking to new ways of developing sustainable urban places. For example, Solihull has got a new sustainable urban quarter around the high speed 2 interchange near the M42, connecting Birmingham Airport, the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham International station and the new HS2 station with a completely automated people mover, which is being delivered by something called the Urban Growth Company. In Bristol—closer to us—they've got Grow Bristol, which is not your average farm. It's run out of recycled shipping containers, uses innovative ways to sustainably farm fish and salad vegetables to sell directly to Bristol's consumers and to the city's restaurant trade clients. 'We’re talking about food metres, not food miles', says one of the company's founders. This is something that I know that some of Cardiff Council's cabinet members are looking at closely, because this is a hydroponic, aquaponic system to grow leafy greens and farm tilapia, with the waste from the fish used to feed the plants. Councillor Michael Michael, the cabinet member for the environment, is looking at a similar scheme here in Cardiff because we need to do this sort of thing. With Brexit coming along, we are potentially at huge risk of losing most of the vegetables that we currently import from Europe. So, we need to think very quickly about this.
I appreciate I've run out of time, but I think we have the expertise here in Cardiff, through a lot of the sustainable development expertise at Cardiff University, both to build sustainable housing and sustainable food programmes. So, I think we need to think outside the box and really take forward our climate change obligations.