Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:54 pm on 14 May 2019.
Thank you. A number of questions there I'll try to address. On the planning point, I think we took a big step forward in the late autumn, with the publication of the latest edition of 'Planning Policy Wales', which made some significant strengthening of the planning guidance for future developments on creating an active travel environment. It'll take some time, I guess, for that to work through, but I think we have made significant progress there.
In terms of schools, the education Minister and I had a number of conversations about this, and we both attended the last meeting of the cross-party group on active travel that Huw Irranca-Davies very helpfully chairs. It's a very good group that we find very useful to engage with. We heard some really good practice of the new Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Hamadryad in Grangetown, which is a fairly unusual school in the sense that it had a planning condition where no cars were allowed. They've done some terrific work there and Dr Dafydd Trystan, the chair of governors, and the headteacher there, Mrs Carbis, I think, have shown an inspirational example of what can be done—the role of leadership. But those are fairly unusual circumstances they found themselves in. So, how can we mainstream them? It shows that where there's a will, there is a way.
The conversation we're still working through is on the design of new schools that are currently within the twenty-first century schools project. The requirement is to provide facilities within the curtilage of the school, not without, and I think the trick to crack—and this is why we're resetting the maps and doing our planning properly—is that when we know that new schools are going to be built, it's not just down to the school builders to put facilities in place, though I think there is room for improvement there, but we need to make sure that the authorities themselves are building in the network of routes outside the curtilage of the school, so that when that school comes on stream those routes are there, going out into the whole community.
On your point on business—it's an important point—we have included some of this within the economic contract, but Dr Tom Porter, public health specialist at Cardiff and Vale health board, again showing the power of leadership, has done some very powerful work on discouraging staff from driving to work and to walk and cycle instead. The Cardiff and Vale health board, which is now mainstreaming that through the public services board for the other public sector employers, were able to show, using human resources data, the value to the whole workforce and the reduction of costs and sickness days lost from getting fewer people driving to work and more people walking and cycling. So, there are examples. As ever with all of this, the challenge is to spread and scale it.
On your final point, which is a challenging point about the journey to school and getting young people using public transport, I think it's a very well-made point. As we look at the future of buses White Paper, that's something we can consider. In terms of changing behaviour patterns, though, I think this is the key point I was making in the statement: if we start creating an environment where you've got well-designed routes, you've got more people using them, you start then to create a critical mass where it seems a normal and natural thing to do. My own reflection: when I started cycling again, having not cycled since being a teenager, in Cardiff probably about 15 years ago, it felt like a very eccentric thing to do. There weren't many people on a bike. Now, it seems like a fairly normal thing to do in Cardiff. In Llanelli, it's still a relatively eccentric thing to do. On the traffic-free paths, there are plenty of people cycling, but on the roads through town, I still feel a bit strange on the bike. There aren't many other people doing it. But it just goes to show that, over the period of a decade or so, you can create a culture of behaviour change, and that, by getting the foundations right, is what we need to do beyond Cardiff.