Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:42 pm on 13 October 2020.
Thank you very much. I very warmly welcome Janet Finch-Saunders's comments. On the two specific points, local authorities already have civil enforcement powers over a number of things. What we are simply doing here is adding a tool to the armoury. So, from a minimalist point of view, we're not creating any extra work or extra responsibilities for them; we're giving them an extra tool to deploy if they choose to deploy it, and if pavement parking is a problem that they're getting in their area and they want to tackle it and they want to issue fines, we will be letting them do that. So, there's no inherent need for additional funding for that. But, obviously we'll be working with local authorities, as we have done, to fully understand if there are any extra demands that will be created to implement this properly and we'll be discussing that in the normal way.
On dropped kerbs, as I say, this is part of shifting the local environment to make it more pedestrian friendly. We have created, over the last 50 years, a hostile environment for pedestrians and for cyclists on our roads and in our communities, and this is part of the movement to change that. Because unless we do change that, we're going to continue to have the problem of obesity, of air quality and of rising carbon emissions—all the things that all of us say we want to tackle—and this is an important part of, on the ground, changing that.
Local authorities already have access to funding through the active travel funds, and let's remember, active travel is about walking and about cycling; it's about pedestrians. And we have money for continuous improvement under the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013 for local authorities, ring fenced every year from the allocations that we make to them, where they are able to access money for improving the environment for small changes like dropped kerbs, just as they have money for taking away cycle lane barriers, for example, that no longer suit the purpose that they were badly designed for in the first place. So, there is funding there already for local authorities to do that, but I would agree with her that this has got to be seen within the context of making our communities more pedestrian friendly, and that's going to require a range of interventions, and this is just one of them.