7. What is the Welsh Government's timetable for introducing a default 20 mph speed limit in urban areas? OQ56618

Following completion of the necessary statutory procedures, a national roll-out to a default 20 mph limit is planned for April 2023.

Thank you very much for that, First Minister. Clearly, it's interesting to see that there is a lot of interest in road safety in today's questions, as well as the impact on air pollution and on carbon emissions. I just want to focus on the impact on children of speeding, because you say that persuading people is the most effective way of doing something about these things, but, unfortunately, in my constituency we have a significant number of drivers who think they have a God-given right to speed past school entrances, to not stop for pedestrians on zebra crossings, even when they are children, and also to park on prohibited zig-zag lines that you often find around schools, as well as around zebra crossings. And that obviously doesn't help the fact that we have one of the highest child pedestrian death rates in Europe, closely following behind Scotland and Northern Ireland. So, how does legislating for a 20 mph limit in residential areas as the default—? How will that be effective if we cannot change this culture of simply ignoring the law as it currently exists?

Llywydd, the Member makes a number of very important points. Pedestrians are five times more likely to be killed at 30 mph compared to traffic moving at 20 mph, so decreasing speed reduces accidents and saves lives. And that is particularly important for children, as the Member has said. We've talked about a series of interconnected things this afternoon in relation to air pollution and traffic. I could have said, and maybe should have said in my answer to the very first question this afternoon, Llywydd, that Clean Air Day in Wales on Thursday has as its main theme protecting our children's health from air pollution. And Darren Millar reminded us earlier of the very sad death of a young person in his constituency, and Members will I'm sure be aware of the death of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, a young child, where the coroner concluded that her death had been caused by the induction and exacerbation of asthma caused by polluted air in the town and street on which she was living.

So, these are very important points, indeed, that the Member raises, and maybe not as pessimistic as maybe the very end of her question suggested about the possibility of culture change. Culture change always seems very hard, but in our own lifetimes, we've seen it happen. When the very first Assembly sat after the elections in 1999, people smoked in offices, smoked in canteens, smoked on the bus on the way to work, smoked when children were present at the table, and now we wouldn't think, would we, of doing that, and this is only 20 years later. I think had we said back then that we could change the culture of smoking in that way, we would have thought that was a pretty ambitious thing to have done. So, I think culture change can happen, and it happens by a combination of efforts.

As I said in my earlier answer to Huw Irranca-Davies, I believe it best starts by persuading and encouraging people—even people who do very bad things, as the Member said, around schools and so on. I don't think demonising people changes people's minds and it doesn't change the way that they behave. We have to be able to make a case to them that doing something different is better for them and for the people that they care for. Then we need to take the sort of positive actions that I also referred to in an earlier answer—all the things that we are doing as a Welsh Government to create that infrastructure for active travel, to make public transport more available and accessible. Then, we have to have enforcement. And we know that when people deliberately park on double yellow lines outside schools, causing the potential dangers that they do, then enforcement sometimes has to be the answer where persuasion has failed.

So, Government action is important, but it's only part of the way in which we can make the culture change that Jenny Rathbone has referred to happen. I don't think we should rule out, Llywydd, the possibility that public opinion may already be in advance of the appetite for political action in just the way that we saw with smoking; I remember the debates here, where there was a lot of fear that somehow we were ahead of where the public were, and the public turned out to be there before us. 

And finally, question 8, Altaf Hussain.