5. Statement by the Minister for Climate Change: Nature, biodiversity and local places for nature

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:48 pm on 12 October 2021.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of John Griffiths John Griffiths Labour 4:48, 12 October 2021

Thank you very much for your statement today, Minister. I'm particularly keen on the local places of nature and connecting people in urban communities, which most of our population live in of course, with nature, as best we can. In Newport, there's a community in Maindee, which is just over the river from the city centre, which had and still has little green space, but they have an organisation, Maindee Unlimited, and an offshoot, Greening Maindee, which is doing a lot of really good work in creating gardens and orchards for community use, working with schools to create corridors for nature near to the school. They have a project opposite Maindee library, where they're based, to develop a patch of ground that was once, basically, a public toilet with a little bit of land around it, called the triangle, to develop that and, again, to green it and to create a community cafe. So, they're doing a lot of really good work. And I just wonder, Minister, if groups like that, with a track record of delivery, would benefit particularly from the schemes and the funding that is available, when they represent areas that are particularly lacking in green space, and Maindee is also very diverse ethnically. It has a lot of social and economic issues, but improving quality of life through these schemes is absolutely vital and puts a spring in every local person's step.

Just one other matter, Minister, I wonder if there's any work you might be able to do with Network Rail where they have—again, in urban areas where a lot of people live—railway bridges that are very unsightly, they're quite forbidding to walk underneath because they drip with water, they're not well lit, they're very drab and forbidding—