Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:22 pm on 10 December 2019.
Can I thank the Minister for her statement on the clean air plans? Obviously, as chair of the cross-party group on a clean air Act for Wales, I want to see an Act, basically. I commend what the Minister says as far as it goes, but I think we need urgent action now. The time has come for urgent action, because this rim of air that we breathe is only 10 miles deep. We have to look after it, you know. When we talk of space travel and distance to planets and stuff, we're talking billions of miles and light years and stuff, but the air we breathe is only 10 miles deep. We have to look after it.
Now, of course, we've had, going back in history, original clean air Acts that reflected the suffocating fatal smogs and pea soupers in London in 1952 and other large cities in the 1940s and 1965s, Manchester and Liverpool. Legislation to produce smokeless fuels then arrived. Obviously, the air cleaned, but there's still pollution there, it's just that the difference now is we can't see it. But our foot has literally gone off the pedal because we're no longer being blinded by those pea soupers. And obviously, the other anomaly was that producing the smokeless fuels for London meant that we managed the transfer of that solid particulate air pollution that was in London, we transferred it to Abercwmboi in the Cynon Valley, that was tasked with producing the smokeless coke fuels instead—a bit of irony.
But anyway, that, along with the legacy of heavy industry and their pollution, and we still see it with open-cast coal and the steel industry and heavy metals like nickel, they're still swooning around the lower Swansea Valley—. So, it's not just the history of pollution that is still very much alive. Obviously, as has been said, we're still producing it as well, actively, with rogue road traffic accidents and road traffic distributions of all sorts. We have huge delays on the M4 at the best of times.