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

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:52 pm on 20 February 2019.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 5:52, 20 February 2019

Okay, well, that's a slightly different point. Let me just finish addressing the other point first. I'm mindful of time, and there's much that I wanted to try and say that I won't be able to say today. We do need to look at regional collaboration as a way of achieving the resources available. The proposal in the bus White Paper for joint transport authorities has the potential, if that's expanded to include active travel, to create a greater critical mass. We do need to provide training. I'm going to be meeting with all the people delivering active travel—not the higher up officers but the people on the ground—to have a robust conversation with them, where they can tell me what the constraints are and how we can streamline the process and help them. We do need better guidance, which we then give training to deliver. The design guidance that we have is seen as sector leading, and England are looking to copy our guidance. But our delivery guidance is not right, and we are currently reviewing that to publish it afresh, alongside the design guidance.

In terms of Jenny Rathbone's point on air pollution, she is absolutely right. The only way that we are truly going to address the issue of air quality is through modal shift. Yes, lower emission cars are part of the solution, but unless we have fewer people driving and more people travelling actively, we are not going to address the issue. But, there are some difficult issues for us to confront in that, which we are currently working through, and I will be happy to speak to her separately, given the time that we have, to understand her points better.

I don't have the time to cover the points that I wanted to say. Let me just say, with your permission, Chair, a couple more things. I think the maps we currently have, submitted by local authorities to deliver their networks, are not good enough. There are some exceptions but, overall, the quality is not high enough. We are where we are on that. I intend to look afresh at that for the next round of submissions in 2021, to start with consultation—because if a council can only inspire 20 people to take part in a consultation on their plans for a network, they're going to find it very difficult to inspire me to invest millions of pounds in it.

So, I intend to take a bold approach when it comes to the next round of funding, and I anticipate there will be complaints from Members that I will not be distributing funding evenly throughout Wales. I will be rewarding ambition. It's essential that, for the next two years, we have schemes that show what difference looks like. So, I will not be rewarding a lack of ambition, but we will be helping those authorities that haven't been ambitious to become more ambitious for the next time round.

And I'm afraid I must bow to the clock, but I can assure Members that I will work with them to make this agenda we all feel passionately about a reality, but let's be under no illusions how difficult this is and how long it's going to take to make it stick, but I genuinely think we can make real progress in the next couple of years. Diolch.