Roads Review

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:07 pm on 7 December 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:07, 7 December 2021

I take very seriously the points the Member has made. I’m familiar with that piece of road and the risks that climate change pose to it. What I don’t think we can have, though, Llywydd, is a position in which everybody will agree on the basic principle that if we’re to be serious about climate change, we cannot make building a new road the default option every time there is a transport problem, but always to want to make a road in their part of Wales an exception to the rule that we have agreed on. The Welsh Government does remain in conversation, of course, with Pembrokeshire County Council. We’ve agreed that the improvements to the A40—they're not the Member’s constituency, I don’t think, but in the county—will go ahead. The fact we have a roads review does not mean that where there are clear safety considerations, for example, that investment in new road facilities will not go ahead. It’s simply that the bar has to be higher than it was in the past to make a new road the answer to a problem. Because unless we are prepared to grasp that difficult nettle, the chance that we will be able to get to carbon neutral by 2050, let alone 2035, will be vanishingly impossible.