Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:17 pm on 20 October 2021.
There was a series of questions there, and I'm mindful of the Deputy Llywydd's plea to keep the answers short, so I will do my best.
I'm getting a little tired of sharing platforms with Conservative spokespeople who call for us to take bold action on climate change and then the next day stand up in the Senedd and demand we spend billions of pounds on roads programmes. Those two things are not compatible, so how you explain that disconnect, I don't understand, because it's complete hypocrisy. That's what it is. It's hypocrisy. You cannot do both things at the same time. Now, you want us to spend £2 billion on a motorway through Newport, which, as we know, would increase traffic and car use, not decrease it as the UK Climate Change Committee tells us we need to do. Your figures on the metro are out of date, because the approach of the Burns commission has shown that an integrated approach of bus, rail and active travel, focused around the city of Newport, can achieve modal shift. It can achieve the same impact as the road for half the price.
You ask where we get the figures of 20 per cent of people not having a car. The answer is quite simple: the census. These aren't contested figures. These are well-established figures. In fact, additional figures from TfW show that 80 per cent of bus users don't have an alternative. So, investing in public transport is as much a social justice case as it is a climate change case.
The suggestion of the all-Wales travel card is an attractive one, but it simply can't be achieved with the fragmented, privatised system that her party has left us as a legacy, and that's why we're taking through the bus modernisation Bill. She may curse and say it's inconvenient that I point out the Conservative record on public transport, but we are living with the legacy of it 40 years on. The privatisation of the bus service was a disaster, and it makes it nigh on impossible to introduce the sort of changes we've seen in London, because in London the bus service was kept regulated in public ownership. That was not—[Interruption.]