2. Will the Minister provide an update on Welsh Government plans to ban pavement parking in Wales? OAQ54962

Yes. We have created a special taskforce group to investigate the issues around pavement parking and decide on how best to implement a solution to this problem. The group is due to report on its findings in June of this year.

I've had concerns, via e-mail and letter, from constituents who are concerned about pavement parking. Many new housing developments are being constructed with very narrow carriageways and insufficient space for cars. That applies to the Cwm Calon Redrow development in my constituency, which is a relatively new development, and people have no choice, because of the bad design by Redrow, but to park on the pavements. One particular issue that any further steps need to consider also is the issue of contractors and trades vehicles that people are driving home from work. These have caused significant obstructions in various different parts of my constituency, and I think it's a planning as much as it is a transport issue, which needs to be addressed. I feel the way forward, following the task group, would be to examine how further consultation will happen, and residents must be included in that, but also developers too. So, can you tell me, once the task group reports, what will be the further plans and how will that then be taken forward?

Thank you. I think all of us have fresh experience of walking miles around our constituencies in recent months, and we'll have seen for ourselves that this is a problem in a variety of communities. And Hefin David is absolutely right: in some, especially the newer estates, households, especially if they have more than one car, often don't really have much alternative other than parking on the pavement. That is why I'm concerned that, when I set up this taskforce, we need to have a solution that meets the realities of the communities that we now have.

So, Phil Jones, who did excellent work for the Welsh Government in coming up with our active travel design guidance, is leading this taskforce for us, and the taskforce on 20 mph speed limits. And I want to see both of them as part of the same solution. Because pavement parking is a symptom of our society's car dependency—it's not the cause of it. And we do need to address these negative effects, what is, in effect, anti-social behaviour in many cases—the careless way and thoughtless way that many people do park—but also, rolled into that, as Hefin David points out, in some areas there's little choice but to do that.

So, that's why the taskforce that Phil Jones has brought together is a pragmatic one. It's got to find a solution that works, that doesn't alienate people and turn people away from the broader cause of behaviour change that we're trying to achieve, and that doesn't make life more difficult for already stretched local authorities. This has to be something that's going to work. So, we've a range of work streams: communications is one of them, because this needs to be, ultimately, about behaviour change. It also has to be about enforcement. So, essentially, we have two options: we either have a blanket approach, which tries to ban all pavement parking, and there are some questions about whether or not we have the powers to do that, or we have a more discriminating approach, which gives local authorities the powers, through civil enforcement, to address hotspots, as they see fit. Now, I'm not going to prejudge the recommendations of the expert panel on this, but as I said, the important thing is that we need to address the problem because it is a problem, but we need to address it in a way that's not going to penalise people and make life more difficult, and it has to work in the longer term.

Can I add my voice to that of Hefin? I think we've all had casework as well as observing really poor practice. I commend Living Streets Cymru, which commissioned a research survey of over 1,000 people—so that's a lot of people in Wales—and that found that 83 per cent of respondents favoured banning pavement parking. Now, I know, in practice, that would create some problems, particularly in those areas that have been so badly designed that there's little option but to park on the pavement or on part of the pavement, but the basic principle should be that you should not obstruct pavements. What on earth are parents with pushchairs or people who are wheelchair-dependent, or just pedestrians, supposed to do?

This is not the way we should be conducting the design of new urban spaces. But it's a long-standing problem in many areas where people really don't have to park on the pavement, but they do so because then it allows traffic to flow in urban areas both ways. Sometimes, we should see that queuing traffic as part of traffic control, and you don't have a right to race through at any speed just to get from A to B. The pedestrian ought to start to be king here.

I thank David Melding for that. As well as commending Living Streets for their research, I would have hoped that he would have commended the Welsh Government for taking action in this area. We are working closely with Living Streets. As I say, he's highlighted some of the complexities that are involved in introducing a ban, and we are going to work through those. Because the current legislation available is a complex mix of criminal and civil sanctions.

So, it will take time to decide what is the best option to proceed with this for Wales, but I hope to keep Members informed over the coming months and provide some briefings about how exactly we intend to do that. But as I say, we need to see this as part of the broader suite of measures we have, alongside 20 mph speed limits, to start bringing about modal shift and addressing the dominance the car has in our society, but that'll only work if we give people alternatives as well.

I'm grateful this matter has been raised because there's another issue in Caerphilly that I'm sure that you'll be aware of, where local residents are unable to park and it's in Bryn Heol in Bedwas, where the residents have just been left exasperated by Caerphilly County Borough Council's indecision or the lack of any action to deal with the problem. They're told they can't park outside their houses on the street, but they also can't park on the pavement for obvious reasons. And the council had announced that they were going to be taking action to help them, but then they've withdrawn from doing that. So, obviously, whilst I completely support what the Government is doing in terms of its ambition to ban pavement parking, would the Deputy Minister agree with me that, in order for this to work, appropriate parking spaces have to be provided by local authorities so that residents can park safely outside their own homes?

I think we shouldn't knock local authorities here because they are in a very difficult position. The problem at heart is the number of cars many of us now own. And the streets simply were not designed to cater for the volume of vehicles that are trying to squeeze into a street that was designed for the horse and cart.

So, it's not simply a case of providing extra land for more car parking, because where will that end? And is this the best use of land in our community—providing it for cars? Surely the real answer is to try and give people alternatives so that they don't need to own multiple cars in their households, and there are other ways to move around.

I think the advent of electric cars and driverless cars, where cars are far less likely to be owned, they're more likely to be leased and shared because the capital costs will be so high—it will be on-demand, responsive transport, and this is only 15 to 20 years away. So, technology does offer us some solution here.

In the short term, councils do have a very difficult problem of trying to arbitrate between these conflicting demands that people have to want to park as closely as possible to where they live. I think we need to give them a set of tools where they can use their judgment of what's right for their communities, but also send the very clear signal that parking willy-nilly where they want when that's blocking people with pushchairs and disabilities from getting around isn't on.