Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:26 pm on 22 June 2021.
As Mark Isherwood said, he has persistently made the case against the red route and, as the old line goes, some people just won't take 'yes' for an answer. We've now responded to that by freezing the scheme and reviewing it. I would have thought he would've welcomed that. I know he's not one to praise the Welsh Government easily, but I thought that was something that he would be a little more gracious about. He is right; the problems remain. This is true across all of Wales. These roads have been developed because there are problems, and if roads aren't going to be the solutions to all of them, then we do need to look at other solutions. That is the challenge before us, and that is partly the challenge that we're going to give the commission to come up with solutions to.
On the case of the second Menai crossing, a key part of the case—[Interruption.] Sorry; the third Menai crossing. We're struggling to have a consensus on how many crossings there are on the Menai. On the Menai crossing—let's at least say that and be ambiguous about the number of bits of it—a key part of the case for that obviously was to deal with the traffic for the new nuclear power station at Wylfa that was anticipated. As we know, sadly that is not now going ahead, and the case for that road has been impacted by that change of circumstances. As I said in the statement, all schemes not currently in the ground need to be reviewed, and there needs to be a set of metrics developed to decide which ones should go ahead and which ones shouldn't. In the meantime, we can reallocate some of that funding towards road maintenance and improving public transport. So, the problems that Mark Isherwood identified can be dealt with in other ways.
The work of the Burns commission in Newport has been quite instructive in this, where there was a very clear view by many that the only solution to dealing with that congestion was a motorway through the Gwent wetlands, whereas the detailed work of the Burns commission shows that, actually, that traffic can be dealt with by creating a modern public transport system for half the price. That work is now going forward through a delivery board and through close working with Newport council, Transport for Wales and the Welsh Government. That, I think, provides a blueprint for other parts of Wales where there is congestion, and where public transport is a realistic alternative for many of those journeys—as I said in my statement, not for every person, not for every journey, but for a sufficient number to make a difference to the problem.