Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Economy and Transport – in the Senedd at 1:38 pm on 22 January 2020.
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.