Diolch yn fawr, Dirprwy Lywydd. I'm grateful, I must say at the beginning, to Russell George for agreeing to accept, I think he said, our amendment 2 and our amendment 7, because the motion as it stands slightly reads like something that one might have seen in the 1980s, which implies that we can solve all of our economic woes by building more roads. I'm sure, from what Russell George has said in his responses to Huw Irranca-Davies, that isn't what he meant. But I do have to point out, Dirprwy Lywydd, that that is what the motion says. 

Nobody is denying for a moment that we will need to continue to invest in our road networks. I think the points that Russell George has made about the importance of that in rural communities, where it may very well be that some of those can never be effectively served by public transport networks—. And, on these benches, it's really important to us that those communities are supported and maintained, because, among other things, many of those communities are communities where Welsh is still a native language, where it's still spoken on a daily basis. And, so, we will need to continue to invest in our roads. Nobody on these benches is denying that. 

But it's not the whole solution. And I think that has been acknowledged. And we do know—and I commend the couple of really good academic studies on this, thinking particularly about what's been said today about the proposed M4 relief road—that the truth is that, over time, you build a road and it fills up. I will quote two of the studies. There's 'Demystifying Induced Travel Demand' written by Roger Gorham for the German Finance Ministry, and 'The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities' by Duranton and Turner for the 'American Economic Review'. And what they show is that you can't, long term, alleviate these problems by just covering up more of the countryside with concrete.

Now, that isn't to say for a moment that something doesn't need to be done about the issues around Newport. I think everybody in this Chamber—. All of us have driven that road or travelled on that road probably at some point, and we all know what happens at the Brynglas tunnels. But we don't believe for a moment that covering a really important site of special scientific interest with more concrete is going to solve that problem, long term. It is true to say that 43 per cent of the journeys made on that section of the M4 in question are journeys of under 20 miles, and many of those are journeys that, with proper public transport solutions, people would not choose to make by car. Ten per cent of the traffic on that stretch is what leads to the congestion. So, if we could take half of that 43 per cent of people off that road—and I say 'people' advisedly, because they are people who are in empty vehicles, just them and one other person a lot of the time—we could deal with that congestion problem. 

Now, the other issue, of course, with the M4 relief road is that it would take seven years to build. Even if we decided to do it, it would take seven years to build. And, in the meantime, Brynglas tunnel misery would continue to be a day-to-day reality.