Like others this afternoon, Deputy Minister, I would also like to welcome the statement that you've made. I think, across the Chamber, despite many differences, we would all welcome the structured thinking that is now taking place within the Welsh Government about the future of our town centres. This is something that affects not only the economy of individual places, but it also deeply affects people's perceptions of themselves. It's an issue that is at the heart of who we are as communities and who we want to be in the places that we live. I very much welcome this holistic approach that is being taken.

But if I could, I would like to move you a little further, Deputy Minister, to be a little more holistic as well. If I think about the communities that I represent: if you take Ebbw Vale, for example. When I speak to people who are retailers and shop owners there, they will tell me that one of the biggest challenges they face is the lack of decent bus services into the town centre, and the same is said in other parts of my constituency. Now, you are delivering £90 million, which is obviously very welcome, but another department is cutting the bus services grant. I think we do need to see a more linked-up approach across Government, so that the work that you are undertaking in your department is supported by the work being undertaken by your colleagues in other departments and isn't undermined—even though I accept that it is unintentionally so. At the same time, we need to ensure that we have the planning in place that will enable town centres to flourish and not simply to become ghettos, as has happened in many places.

Having said that, I really do welcome very much the new emphasis, as I see it, on the green infrastructure. I think that's one of the really key issues. When you look hard at places you like to be—town centres and community centres that are attractive, that feel comfortable, that people want to spend time in—they are also areas that are physically attractive as well. We need to ensure that we are able to invest both in the physical built environment, but also the green infrastructure, which I think will have a profound impact on people's perceptions of where they are.

I would ask you to go a little further, Minister, in terms of how this is delivered. You said, in both your statement and also in answer to earlier questions, that you wanted to work with other stakeholders and the rest of it. I think that that's all very laudable, and it would be more surprising if you didn't say that. But there is a lack of resource, I believe, in local government and elsewhere that enables this sort of structured development to take place. I would like to see the Welsh Government investing in greater resource, whether it's town centre managers or the equivalent of developing a structured approach to ensuring that we do have these different policy areas brought together in order to deliver change in a particular community.

I would also like to ask you what work you are doing to ensure that the legislation we passed here at the end of the last Assembly—I think it was the built environment Act—is being delivered in order to ensure that some of the architecture that we want to protect in different parts of our communities, and also the built environment itself, is maintained and that that law is being used to its full extent. I'm unconvinced at the moment that it is being used to the full extend it should be in order to protect some of our most precious environments.

But I hope also—and I'll finish with this, Deputy Presiding Officer—that the Welsh Government will be able to ensure that we don't simply go through another process of investing in individual projects, but we actually invest in whole places.