Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:14 pm on 26 February 2020.
Thank you very much, Llywydd. Yes, half an hour is a very short period of time for a debate like this. It's not the only one we’ll be having, and the other half an hour, of course, was used to point to one way of getting to grips with climate change. A core theme is shared by both debates, namely that the climate crisis is a reality. That's the message that comes through clearly to all of us, I'm sure, from these debates. That is, floods like this are going to become more common in the future; there are areas that haven't been threatened in the past that are going to be under threat in years to come. So, we need urgent answers. I think there has been a tendency for us to think that we can find our solutions for tomorrow. Well, tomorrow has come. We do have to find these solutions today. So, we do need solutions immediately, and those are listed in our motion, of course, namely an independent inquiry, that we need to revise the plans for adverse weather, we need to deal with insurance issues and all of the points that have been raised in this debate, in addition to the long-term solutions: hard and soft infrastructure, more resilience in the system, and dealing with issues in the planning system.
I have a housing estate close to where I live that has been built on a field called 'salmon field'. It's named so because the fields flooded every year, and the local residents used to go to fish for salmon in the pools when the water receded. There's now this housing estate on that field. And do you know what? It flooded a few years ago. That tells you everything that you need to know about that location. There are lessons to be learnt, and clearly we haven't learned them sufficiently.