It seems remarkable and contradictory that it's only a few weeks since this place backed calls to declare a climate emergency, the first parliament in the world to do so, and yet some Members here are calling for the building of a new major road for economic reasons. Regardless of how you voted in the climate change emergency debate, you can't deny that building a road of this size would cause a huge amount of environmental damage and encourage increased car use, which, whether powered by electricity or fossil fuel, will increase pollution. I understand that congestion itself increases pollution, but this relief road would not stay congestion-free for long, and then what? Build another road and another after that. Where does it end? 

It is not that there are too few roads in Wales. The problem is that we've got too many car journeys in some places at some times. We all accept that congestion increases year on year. But the road network isn't shrinking, it's the increasing reliance on car use that's causing the issues. It isn't really rocket science to figure out what's causing the problem. It does, however, take some new thinking in order to solve the problem. I'm sorry, but there are surely no economic benefits that justify the permanent loss of important environmental areas, the continued march towards tarmacking over Wales and ruining the country for future generations. Anyone calling for this road to be built needs to tell the Welsh public what level of economic benefit they consider enough to condemn our future generations to live in a pollution-ridden concrete and tarmac jungle where they can't breathe the air and can't see any trees or hear birds sing.

I don't doubt that this Government can be doing much more to reduce congestion, whether that's through investment in public transport, ensuring the proper roll-out of superfast digital connections, incentivising companies to adopt staggered operating times and so on, but the failure to do that thus far doesn't justify calls to take the unimaginative step to build more major roads. When roads are built to ease congestion, for a short while it does work, but planners take their foot off the gas in exploring other options to deal with congestion. Refusing to build more roads that cost too much, both financially and environmentally, means that more sensible and sustainable options will have to be found, and there's a lot of money available to explore the more sensible options that will help reduce our carbon footprint and that don't require the permanent tearing up of our beautiful land.

It's time to halt the squandering of our country's landscape and our natural environment, the destruction of our wildlife and the pollution of our air from huge construction projects when the problems could be solved in other ways. So, I do support the Welsh Government's recent decision to can the M4 relief road. There are some here, though, who, if they have their way would see a road built that has little justification and would cause irreparable damage to the environment of Wales just to score a few political points. I hope the Welsh Government will now take a more sensible approach to road building.

On a final note, there's a Native American saying that only when the last river has been poisoned and the last tree has been felled will people realise that you can't eat money. So, please think on before you start talking about building extra roads. Thank you.