Our landscapes wear the scars of Wales's past. Pitheads, crumbling viaducts, bridges that lead nowhere, and coal tips that stain our mountainsides, tips that speak of a time of soot and clamour, of fires raging underground, and lives buried in the soil. Our Valleys paid long and hard for the spoils of coal mining, and it is maddening to think, Dirprwy Lywydd, that legislation surrounding tip safety was not even introduced until after the Aberfan disaster. And even after that unspeakable, that devastating event—a moment that should have prompted resignations, a reckoning of fundamental change and mass shifting of this waste and spoil—the tips were not removed from the other mountains in our Valleys. If those tips had been in Surrey or Bedfordshire, I doubt whether they'd have been left to pockmark the skyline. But in Wales, in Bedwas, Penalltau, Penydarren, Bedlinog, communities lie in the shadow of these monstrosities, feeling anxious every time it rains, because the more rain we get now means that those tips could become even more unstable. In 2020, it was a happy accident that no-one lived in the path of the Tylorstown landslip. Do we want to wait to see whether fate will continue to be on our side?

Dirprwy Lywydd, deep mining meant that danger was always present. The most that they could do was to minimise that danger, but the flaw came when that same mindset was put in charge of safety above ground, treating our towns like rubbish dumps. I mentioned legislation; well, the law we have is starkly deficient. There is next to no management, no consistency with risk assessments, no obligation to inspect the tips or to keep them safe, and no way of enforcing landowners to act if there is a danger. Seventy tips in Caerphilly are deemed high risk; 59 in Merthyr and 16 in Blaenau Gwent have this same notoriety, and still those in Westminster squabble about the cost. Who will pay to make these tips safe? Should it really fall to the local authorities of communities that were plundered for their coal and saw none of the profits invested back? The wealth was ripped from the ground under their feet. How can Westminster shrug off that shame? It should not have taken a near miss in Tylorstown to force Government, NRW and local authorities to realise that they are death traps not in our path, but hanging over our heads. How long will the people of Bedwas, of Penyard, Nant-yr-Odyn, Hengoed have to live with that unease hanging over them? How long will this injustice hang in the air?