Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:55 pm on 16 October 2018.

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Photo of Carwyn Jones Carwyn Jones Labour 1:55, 16 October 2018

Well, his party, as far as I'm aware, is in favour of more coal, which means more opencast, actually, because that's the only way to really get at coal in Wales now. It would be very difficult to sink any deep mines, even if we wanted to, to access that coal, and hugely expensive because of the geological faults, particularly in south Wales. I'm not sure whether he's saying that somehow the EU is polluting Britain with biomass. And he cites the River Irwell—there's work to be done there, clearly, with plastic. But the point is this: I don't make the point that somehow all environmental regulations will fall away as soon as we leave the EU; I make the point that it was the EU that forced Britain to clean up its act. The UK had an awful record when it came to pollution. It was forced to clean up beaches, clean up rivers, clean up the sea, because of European regulation. I would not want to see a situation in the future where we went backwards because of some crazed free-market ideology that said that environmental regulation is something that should be light touch. Absolutely not; we pride ourselves on our environment in Wales, we pride ourselves on the fact that it's been cleaned up so much over the past 30 years, and it will not go backwards.