Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:19 pm on 22 June 2021.
On that final point, I would note that 50 years ago, we had significantly higher levels of public transport use, walking and cycling, and the hills haven't suddenly appeared in the last 50 years. I think what has changed is our attitudes, our expectations and our habits, and that is the challenge for us, in behavioural change. There is no one solution to tackling carbon emissions in transport; there is a battery of solutions. I think we've seen through the increase of remote working one that we didn't think was available to us—to reduce the need to travel in the first place, and the creation of co-working hubs as we have right across the Valleys, through the Valleys taskforce, as part of our broader project of trialling different approaches so that people don't have to make a long commute every day.
In terms of public transport, we need a legislative set of proposals in place, we need to look again at the subsidy and the commercial arrangements, and we need to look at the fares. There's a great deal that we need to do. The Fflecsi project that we've been trialling in Newport of demand-responsive buses has got a real potential for us. Because one of the difficulties we've got with buses is that buses have become a social justice issue as much as a climate change or transport issue. Transport for Wales surveys show that 80 per cent of bus passengers have no alternative other than to use the bus, and I'm afraid, because of the direction of transport policy over a long time, buses have become the preserve of people who have no option. They've been the preserve of people on lower incomes and older people, and we need to make buses for everybody. The demand-responsive model, I think, has a chance of attracting new people onto buses who otherwise would not have thought buses are for them. I think that is part of our challenge.
In terms of the first question—to complete my going in reverse through the points made—the question of what is a good road, as I think Vikki Howells put it, I wouldn't quite put it in that way. When is a road the right solution? I don't have a fixed view on that. That's something for the experts on the panel to come up with, because that's what we need help with. That's why we've set up this project. I'm clear that roads have a role to play in our transport system. I strongly believe we've not been maintaining the current roads we have well enough. And again, the inquiry that I believe she sat on with the Economy, Infrastructure and Skills Committee in the last Senedd heard lots of evidence and made recommendations on the state of our roads. I think we should be spending more money on maintaining what we've got, but then still building roads when that is necessary. The question of when that is necessary is the advice I'm seeking from this panel.