I'm really encouraged by the degree of consensus there is, both on the importance of buses and on some of the measures that we need to take collectively to improve the situation. As Huw Irranca-Davies said at the outset, we need to restore the public purpose of public transport, and I thought that was a very powerful and insightful comment. And Heledd Fychan set out very powerfully how some people are currently let down by a service that is not always functional and certainly isn't always easy. As I made clear yesterday, to tackle the imperative of climate change we need to make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do, and currently it is not. It is much easier if you have a car, and bear in mind something like 20 per cent of households don't have a car, but if you have a car it is the simplest way to get around. If we are all sincere in our objectives to meet the climate emergency, we have to shift that, so the obvious, easy way to get about for most everyday journeys is public transport. We are some way off that, and I think we all need to be honest about that. There are many and complex reasons why we are some way off that, and they've been captured by many people in this debate.

We have a system that is very complex. The privatisation in the early 80s has been a disaster, and has made things extremely difficult to co-ordinate. The public transport system in London works because it is regulated. Outside of London it rarely works, because it is not regulated. It's not that complex. We had hoped to introduce legislation in the last Senedd to introduce franchising into Wales. We were not able to do that, but we are determined to do it in this Senedd, and we'll be publishing a plan later in this year on how we intend to do that. I want us to work together, given the shared ambition in this Chamber, to make that the most ambitious plan that we can, not to do the minimum that we need to do, but to see if we can stretch ourselves to really achieve a seamless, end-to-end public transport system that works for most people.

I'd echo the comments in the Chamber about how public transport and bus services were the quiet heroes of the pandemic, and Vikki Howells's tribute particularly to the bus drivers who enabled key workers, NHS staff and children to return to school—we couldn't have done it without them. I think it's also right to recognise the role of the Welsh Government in stepping in and saving an industry, as Hefin David acknowledged Nigel Winter from Stagecoach has pointed out. I pay tribute to my colleague Ken Skates, who I see on the screen, who worked closely with the bus industry alongside me through the pandemic to make sure the package of measures was there to stop this essential ecosystem disappearing before our eyes.

We have put significant money in, and through putting that money in we have enhanced relationships, we have enhanced the underpinning arrangements, and we're now in a far stronger position than when we went in, having a relationship and contracts in place with commercial operators, which I think puts us in a far better position to realise the ambition we'll be setting out later this year in our bus strategy.

As has been said, buses are often the neglected bit of the public transport system. They carry by far the most number of passengers, but they have not been the priority for all parties. There have been lots of comments here, 'Well, the Welsh Government's to blame for this'—I would encourage you to look right across the UK and see if the bus service is any better, and I would encourage you to look at your own manifestos over many elections to see if you were calling for greater action on buses, and the truth is you were not. I think all of us have neglected buses, as there were costs for the public transport system, and that needs to change.

The fact is, as has been pointed out, this is a social justice argument. Eighty per cent of bus passengers don't have an alternative, but equally, 50 per cent of people never travel on a bus. So there's a real social divide here between the image that buses have of being not for people like us, and there is an othering of buses that I think we need to confront. Buses have to be for everyone. They have to be attractive for everybody and they have to work for everybody, and until we do that, we will not transform the way buses work in the way we all want to see and need to see if we are going to tackle climate change. That's going to require investment, but it's also going to require tough political choices here and in local government. It's going to require local authorities being willing to reallocate road space away from cars towards shared public transport facilities, and I was very pleased to hear Natasha Asghar make that point in her opening statement. And I hope she and her colleagues will see that through because that is not going to be easy, because there will be howls of pain from people who will feel inconvenienced or disconcerted by that. But that's what we need to do, because what bus operators have told the many inquiries that Hefin David outlined time and again is one of the main barriers bus operators face to attracting greater patronage is reliability and journey time. That's about making buses the fastest, the easiest way to get around. That means putting buses ahead of cars when it comes to planning our roads and when it comes to priorities of traffic lights. That's what we need to do. The question for all of us: do we have the courage to carry it through? I do and I hope that you'll be with me when it comes to that time.