7. Member Debate under Standing Order 11.21(iv): Active Travel

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:48 pm on 20 February 2019.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 5:48, 20 February 2019

Absolutely, and I think that when Carwyn Jones, the former First Minister, said that he wouldn’t dream of cycling in Cardiff, he was roundly criticised, and I think he was right to say that. It’s important for people to feel comfortable to say that they don’t feel happy to cycle or walk under current conditions. The answer to safety is to have enough people doing this so you feel safe, and there is safety in numbers. That’s the real way we address safety, so that it’s not an isolated task.

I want to try and address the main point in the motion around ambition and the call for a strategy. I don’t really mind what we call it, whether it’s a strategy or an action plan, but I think it is essential that we do address that and are more ambitious in what we say we’re going to do and what we try to do. The existing plan does not include targets, but it expressed an ambition to increase the percentage of people cycling for active travel by at least once a week from 5 per cent to 10 per cent, and walking once a week from 64 per cent to 80 per cent by 2026. But these are not ambitious. Even if you achieved 10 per cent of people cycling once a week, that would count somebody willing to go down to the paper shop on a Saturday morning once a week as achieving the target, and that does not lead to the words that we heard Huw Irranca-Davies quote from the Act, which said that walking and cycling would become the natural and normal way of getting about in Wales. So, that just does not cut it. But, even to achieve that, it would require a doubling of current levels. That just shows the gap that there is, which we want to fill.

The current action plan does include a commitment to develop this further and specify evidence-based targets. Now, three years on, I think it's time that we do that. Next year, we will have a Wales transport strategy published, and it's essential that active travel is mainstreamed into that, not hived off as a different agenda. So, my proposal is that we don't have a specific active travel strategy at this stage—the Wales transport strategy is the strategy—but that we do have a refreshed active travel action plan and delivery plan, and that it is ambitious. The targets that we come up with need be achievable because unachievable targets are counter-productive. We need to do that. We need to develop them in collaboration—to co-produce with the undervalued workforce who currently deliver active travel. We do have a small band of people in local government who are doing their best, under difficult circumstances, to deliver this agenda. We need to involve them and give them a stake in developing the way forward.