Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:55 pm on 5 February 2020.
I'm very pleased to take part in this debate, actually, and congratulations all round on the quality of the discourse. Plainly, as chair of the cross-party group on a clean air Act for Wales, I want to see an Act, basically, because I think we need urgent action now. The time has come for urgent action because this rim of air on top of this earth, of this planet, this rim of air that we all breathe, is only 10 miles deep. We have to look after it. When we're talking about inter-planetary travel and stuff, we're talking millions and millions of miles, but we depend, to breathe, on a rim of air that's just 10 miles deep. Certainly, we have to look after it and respect it.
Now, of course, going back in history, we've had original clean air Acts before. They reflected the suffocating fatal smogs and pea soupers in London in 1952 and other large cities in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Legislation then followed to produce smokeless fuels. Obviously, the air cleaned, i.e. the air became clear, but there's still pollution there; the difference now is that we can't see it. So, our foot has literally gone off the pedal, because we're no longer being blinded by those pea soupers and smogs of yore. And, obviously, the other anomaly was that producing the smokeless fuels for London meant that we managed to transfer solid particulate air pollution that was in London to Abercwmboi in the Cynon Valley, which was tasked with producing the smokeless coke fuels instead in that infamous coking plant, plastering that valley with particulates instead of London.
Now, we've declared a climate emergency, as we've all heard, and we have the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, and we have serious levels of air pollution damaging health and killing people now, today. I accept Hefin's point: it's an inexact science. This has started in the environmental health field, it is slow to have got into the public health and health fields. Always, we have environment leading the charge, which is fine—somebody needs to lead the charge—but health should be involved as well. The figure is 2,000 deaths—2,000 premature deaths—per year in Wales. We have increasing asthma levels; we have increasing—[Interruption.]