4. Statement by the Deputy Minister for Economy and Transport: Llwybr Newydd — A New Wales Transport Strategy

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:52 pm on 17 November 2020.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 4:52, 17 November 2020

Well, thank you for those questions. As he said, when the facts change, you change your mind. When he was responsible for writing the UKIP manifesto, he was against the black route, and then the facts changed, he changed parties and he changed his mind. So, you know, I think he's putting that principle into practice there. What did change, to answer the question, is that the costs changed. At the time of the 2016 election, the M4 relief road was priced at around £700 million, and, by the time the First Minister made the decision, it was priced at £2 billion. Now, there's a massive opportunity cost from investing £2 billion in 40 miles of road through protected wetlands, which means you can't spend it on other things. And he's wrong to say that climate change—. Sorry, Deputy Llywydd, he's continuing to heckle; I'm happy to have an informed conversation with him, but it's hard to respond to it when I can't hear what he's muttering away about. There was strongly, in the First Minister's justification, the case around biodiversity loss, which wasn't properly judged in the inspector's inquiry, and that is absolutely intrinsically linked to climate change.

His characterisation of modal shift being about blocking off roads I think signals the sort of politics that we can expect from Mark Reckless. It's not about blocking off roads at all. It's about allocating road space to the sort of modes we want to see. We've seen this during the coronavirus pandemic response, where we have created additional space in town centres for people to be able to socially distance on pavements. We have seen, during the pandemic, people cycling and walking in a way they didn't before, because there was less traffic on the roads. And we want to try and lock in that behaviour, because there's a lot of evidence, if he's interested in it, from the sustainable travel towns in England over a period of years, showing that you can bring about behaviour change, but the way you sustain that behaviour change is by reallocating road space, so you encourage more people to do it. So, it's not about blocking off roads; it's about enabling behaviour change.

And in terms of rail nationalisation, yes, it was something that came out of a crisis, but, in a crisis, we had choices, and those choices were informed by our values. We faced exactly the same crisis as the Department for Transport faced in England. They took a choice to use the operator-of-last-resort mechanism to keep those franchises being run in the private sector for a fee and a profit. We took the choice to bring those within Transport for Wales, an option that they don't have in England, so we don't have profit being taken out by the private sector, but we have it run in the public interest.