Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:50 pm on 20 October 2021.
Well, I think we should be more diagnostic, really, when it comes to public transport in rural areas. I know there is a fixation on heavy rail trains, but, in carbon terms, we've got very tough targets to have to meet. We have to increase emission cuts in the next 10 years more than we've managed in the whole of the last 30 years, and we have a finite amount of money to do that with. So, I think we need to make very hard-headed judgments about where the money we have can make best effect when it comes to carbon savings. And it's my view that spending over £1 billion on heavy rail in rural areas is not the best way to do that.
Now, I think we can achieve significant modal shift in rural areas using different modes. So, as I mentioned in my statement, if we look at the example of rural Germany or rural Switzerland, where they have flexi buses, as we're developing in Wales, they have electric bikes, they have car clubs—there's a whole range of other things that can be done quickly, far quicker than building a heavy rail route, to give people practical alternatives to the car that wouldn't cost as much and would enable us to hit our climate change targets in a way that diverting resources into schemes like these would not.