Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:50 pm on 10 December 2019.
I always get to this point. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Can I give a broad welcome to the statement and the announcements today, but, like many individuals and organisations outside, this is a bit like that 'Bake Off' moment, where they describe to us what they're going to do and we're licking our lips at it but we're waiting to see what actually comes out of the oven? So, there is a bit of anticipation on timescales and detail and so on going forward, which I'm sure will come. But could I just say—? I've said this before and I mean it absolutely thoroughly: this is our equivalent nowadays of the cholera epidemics in London in the mid-nineteenth century. The evidence clearly shows that this is a social justice issue and it shows what measures need to be taken. The question is now whether we are minded to move firmly and fast to actually take the necessary actions and the Minister has described some of that within her statement today and some of the ideas of what we could do. What we now need to do is actually to action them and get on with them.
So, let me ask some specific questions here—and it is a social justice issue, because this affects by and large the most disadvantaged communities more heavily and it is the children in those schools in those. So, I'm going to focus on transport. First of all, I would ask the Minister: do we not now have to do what the active travel hierarchy says, which is to invest most in cycling and walking and public transport, and, actually, the little metal boxes that we're in—they're down the bottom of the list, not at the top of the list as they currently are? That's part of the sequence to doing this air quality issue because we've literally now—quite literally—driven ourselves into an air quality cul-de-sac where we're sitting in air-conditioned, surround-sound, heated-seat metal boxes, dropping our children off to school, competing like pinballs with other mums and dads to squeeze along zig-zag yellow lines, and then we bang our heads on steering wheels as we sit in another daily crush on the motorway or back road rush-hour rat runs on the way into work in towns and cities. Now, Chris Rea may happen to be one of the largest individual donors to the Conservative Party, but he was wise indeed when he said
'this is the road to hell.'
So, can we look at—? How soon can we look at introducing 20 mph default speed limits? We've talked about them. It's the right idea. We now need to get on with it. Why aren't school exclusion zones mentioned within this specifically? I hope you haven't ruled them out. I hope, in the consultation, school exclusion zones, where we can either say to parents, 'Do the walk or cycle or scoot to school with your children, accompany them'—like I did myself, I'm not speaking out of turn here—'or, alternatively, park elsewhere and stride'. The park and stride stuff that's been done by Sustrans, Living Cities and so on—