It's six years since Mark Barry's report, 'A Metro for Wales' Capital City Region', and it's three years since the Cardiff capital region board published 'Powering the Welsh Economy', which argued that an integrated transport system, aligned with land use planning, could be a catalyst for economic change across the region. What we need, it argues, is a modern, high-quality, multimodal, integrated public transport network, and what they were saying was we don't need more roads. 

One morning last week, I travelled to visit a farm on the Vale of Glamorgan—up, I think it's called, the A4232—and I was truly astonished at the nose-to-tail queues coming into Cardiff at nine o'clock in the morning. What were they doing? The reason they were all sitting there in their cars is because there isn't an adequate rail service, or a tram service, to enable them to do the right thing for both themselves and their children, which is to commute in by public transport. This has to be the realistic alternative to the King Canute proposals that Mark Reckless and Paul Davies regularly espouse, which is to build more roads, because that simply will generate more cars and more gridlock at peak times. That is not the solution, and we can't afford to do it, because we know that a rail line costs the same as a motorway, yet it carries between eight and 20 times more people. So, clearly, rail wins over roads.

But we do need to have some really clear solutions to the commuting problems that exist around Newport, and we also need to connect the Maesteg, Ebbw Vale and Vale of Glamorgan lines with the rest of the Cardiff capital region, because it's not a binary solution. We don't want everybody coming into the city centre; we need people to be able to travel around in a predictable way where they know that they're going to arrive at specific times, and that is where road always loses, and rail and trams are going to be the winners. So, I'd like to probe a little bit further as to what the pace of change that Network Rail is going to be able to deliver is, because I believe that, Ken Skates, you wrote to the route managing director of Network Rail at the end of 2016, because you'd been told it would take 28 years to clear the backlog of work needed to get the Welsh system up to the standard required, because of the really devastatingly poor level of investment we've been getting from the UK Government. I also note that Professor Calvin Jones, a professor of economics at Cardiff Business School, has said publicly it could take decades to get the metro that we need. He says that this is a minimum 15 to 20-year project. 

I would like to argue that we need a Government in London that understands that the parts of the UK that need investment are places like the north-east of England and Wales, which have been starved of funding, instead of giving it to very, very expensive HS2, which is just rewarding the areas that are already booming. So, I want to probe further a couple of things. One is the case for light rail, because the topography and number of stops on the Valleys lines are never going to achieve the speeds, or indeed the frequency, of the services that we need if we're going to really encourage people to use rail rather than cars, and I just wonder why we are still pursuing the heavy rail rolling stock options, because in order to make rail or tram competitive, say, to Merthyr, you've got to ensure that the journey time is reduced to 40 minutes if you're going to make that case.

The light rail network is going to be cheaper to run, potentially saving millions over years, and it will also use less electricity, which means less carbon emissions. And the other thing I'd really be keen to hear from the Minister is the plans for those crucial four lines that run between Cardiff and Newport, because two of them, obviously, need to be dedicated to the main lines between Swansea, Cardiff and London, but those two other lines: why can they not be used for commuter services, both to Newport, to Ebbw Vale, et cetera? It seems to me that these are services we are simply ignoring when they already exist, and this would give us the breathing space to create the tramlines in the areas that we really, really need. Remember that 25 per cent of households do not have a car. So, this idea of creating more roads simply excludes them and makes them even poorer. We have to make the public transport system work for everybody, and therefore we need better rail services, but we also need better tram and bus services.