6. Statement by the Deputy Minister for Climate Change: Roads review

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:29 pm on 22 June 2021.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 5:29, 22 June 2021

In terms of the impact on business, one of the problems businesses have is congestion where you have people using cars to make journeys that could be made by other ways, but instead are snarling up the road network. So, if we get this right, we can take traffic off the road that doesn't need to be there, where there are practical alternatives. I repeat the figure that two-thirds of all journeys are for distances of under 5 miles; they're not these long-distance, complex business journeys that we often hear about. It's freeing up the road for those journeys where there isn't an alternative to take place without being delayed by traffic that could be displaced. So, I think that's an important thing to say. 

In terms of air quality, this is one of the issues that this Senedd is going to have to face: what goes into a clean air Bill, how ambitious and bold we want to be about that, what package of measures improves air quality. There is a vision for simply building bypasses all across Wales, to shift the problem from one place to another. I'm not convinced entirely that that deals with the issue of air quality. Clearly, as tailpipe emissions fall away, as cars are increasingly electrified, that's going to have a significant impact on local air quality within town centres, and behaviour change is a very important part of it, too. If we can achieve modal shift, we can reduce traffic, we can reduce pollution and we can reduce congestion. We can do that quicker than we can through heavy engineering interventions, and we can do it cheaper, and reproduce other benefits too. So, I think there is a complex mixture. I think the go-to default option that too often has been had, that air quality is best dealt with by a road, I think needs a more granular look, and that's one of the things I hope the review will deal with, because I completely recognise the point, and as I said, I'm familiar with it in my own constituency. Cars pollute. They kill. They produce air that damages the health of people, and we need to tackle it. The best way to tackle it—I think that's something that we're still figuring out, and that's what I hope the review will help us with.