Today's short debate is to be presented by Jane Dodds. So, I call on Jane Dodds to speak to the topic that she has chosen. Jane, over to you. 

Thank you very much, Llywydd, and I'm delighted to hold this debate this afternoon and to draw attention to public transport in Wales. I'm pleased that Carolyn Thomas, Mabon ap Gwynfor and Jayne Bryant have expressed an interest in this debate, and I've agreed to give them some time so that Carolyn, Mabon and Jayne can contribute to the debate. It's a lonely place to be a Liberal Democrat in the Senedd, so I am grateful for that.

We all know that young people have been hit hard by the COVID pandemic and that they will continue to be affected long after the direct risks of COVID-19 to public health have dissipated. I'm also aware of the priority shared across the Chamber to remove the barriers faced by young people in accessing services, jobs and opportunities, and I believe that affordable public transport should be a key part of delivering this.  

The Deputy Presiding Officer took the Chair.

That's why the Welsh Liberal Democrats are proposing that we make public transport—bus and rail travel—free to all under 25-year-olds in Wales, as a key element of that recovery programme for young people.

There are three areas that I want to briefly highlight. First, in bringing forward this debate, I want to reflect on my party’s record in this area. In the fourth Senedd, Welsh Liberal Democrat colleagues made concessionary travel for 16 to 18-year-olds a key part of negotiations with the Welsh Government, later extending the scheme to 21-year-olds. This was, in fact, a policy that young members of the Welsh Liberal Democrats brought to our party conference. And that approach has been a success, hasn’t it? At the end of October 2020, there were approximately 32,000 active MyTravelPasses in circulation and, pre pandemic, there were more than 1.3 million discounted journeys. TrawsCymru's free weekend travel initiative, which ran from July 2017 to March 2020, also shows that discounted fares can work, with an increase then of more than 81,000 journeys. So, if those schemes work in encouraging take-up of public transport, then I do think that we should look at what more we can do to encourage people to make the switch to public transport and to ease financial pressures. I do welcome the Government's youth guarantee and would repeat comments I made during the Minister’s statement about ensuring that it is not only a meaningful offer, but one that young people can reach.

Secondly, there's the environmental aspect. Transport is our third largest carbon emitting sector, making up 17 per cent of Wales's carbon emissions. Private cars alone account for 7.7 per cent of those. And Wales continues to have the highest proportion of people travelling to work by car than any other part of the UK, and those figures have remained stable over the past 15 years. So, we know that we need to encourage as many people as possible out of private vehicles. I am acutely aware that there is a desperate need for additional funding to enable decarbonisation of public transport. And, unlike in Scotland, without a dedicated fund to support bus operators to rapidly clean up their bus fleets, this will be a difficult task for operators. I do hope the Deputy Minister can shed some light on what work is being undertaken to funnel financial support to achieve this. But, without a concerted effort, modal shift and decarbonisation agendas, we will be a long way off, when public transport provision is so variable across Wales.

So, my final area is in relation to communities in rural Wales. We don't want them being left behind when there is properly funded and co-ordinated investment in public transport. On this issue, I'm grateful to the Confederation of Passenger Transport for their time earlier this month to talk through the current challenges facing the bus industry. Bus journeys made up three in every four public transport journeys in 2019, but we have still seen a 22 per cent decline in the number of bus journeys between 2008 and 2019. There are lots of reasons for that, but punctuality, frequency, routes, quality and cost are all contributing factors, and these are exacerbated in rural areas. It is important to look at good practice for public transport in rural areas, both in the UK and abroad, such as the Ring a Link service in rural Ireland, the mobility agency in Italy, and—I do like this one—the Bürgerbus in Germany. It's not what you think it is.

Local authorities and local travel planning must have the teeth and the resources to make public transport reliable and accessible to everyone—one cohesive, responsive, public travel network. And touching on trains in rural areas, they could be an option, but cost and efficiency is a challenge. This year saw the steepest average UK increase in rail fares since 2013, which comes, as we know and as we've heard today, as the cost of essential household bills continues to soar. So, our proposal is for free rail travel for young people when journeys start and end in Wales—that is, those under the remit of Transport for Wales.

So, to finish, in summary, we propose that we make bus and rail travel free for under-25-year-olds in Wales, and ask that the Government look into how and how soon this can be achieved. I look forward to the response and to working with the Deputy Minister on this issue. Diolch yn fawr iawn.

Could I begin by thanking Jane Dodds for this short debate? Public transport is an issue close to my heart as well. Before I was elected to the Senedd, I delivered a petition with more than 3,500 signatures on it, which called for buses to be run for people not profit. These were all people that were really worried and concerned about losing their public bus transport. As chair of the cross-party group on public transport, I recently heard evidence on the need to improve marketing to encourage the use of public transport again, giving the public confidence to return to using buses and trains. Currently, 15 per cent of people expect they will use public transport less after the pandemic, and 23 per cent are undecided. As it stands, the use of private vehicles for many is an affordable and more efficient way to travel, meaning that to reach public transport targets serious changes will be required. Key actions for the recovery of the public transport sector include the need to reassure passengers.

A free travel card will encourage people to use public transport at a young age, giving them confidence that it is a normal and preferred way of travel as they go through to adulthood. Across Europe, we are beginning to see the benefits of free public transport, and from the end of this month in Scotland, anyone aged between five and 21 will be able to apply for a Young Scot card, which will allow them to travel by bus for free. In Tallinn in Estonia, all public transport is free for residents of the city, and in the French city of Dunkirk, free public transport led to reduced carbon emissions and helped to revitalise the former industrial port, with passenger numbers increasing by 60 per cent during the week. Public transport is absolutely vital to any serious attempt to tackle climate change. I welcome this debate, and I look forward to working with colleagues across the Senedd to bring about a transport system for the challenges of our future. Diolch.

Thank you to Jane for bringing this debate before us today. It's a very important debate for all parts of Wales, but I want to focus in the minute I have on rural Wales and to look specifically at Dwyfor Meirionnydd. I recognise and thank Jane for referring to rural Wales in her contribution. Of course, what we have seen over the last decades is the centralisation of services away from our communities, services moving into cities and towns—in the case of north Wales, moving towards the coast and away from our smaller rural villages. Therefore, people can't access those services. Just think if you're a young person living in somewhere like Trawsfynydd and wanted to travel to play football and there's no 3G pitch available nearby; if you need treatment, and you don't want people to know about that, but you are reliant on private transport, on a friend, or a member of your family to take you to hospital or the clinic.

I want to refer specifically to one example to highlight the importance of this. I've been speaking to the charity GISDA; I've referred to them in the past. They're an excellent charity working in the north-west of Wales helping disadvantaged young people. They carried out a consultation with users of that charity, and the main challenge facing those young people was mental health, and the lack of facilities for mental health, and one of the challenges was not being able to reach those facilities. If you live in Harlech or the far end of Llŷn, or Meirionnydd, you have to travel hours to get to Bangor, Colwyn Bay or even further afield. This demonstrates the importance of transport, particularly for young people in our communities. We need to give it the greatest import and to invest in public transport in order to ensure that these people receive the services that they need. So, thank you, Jane, and I hope we will get a positive response from the Deputy Minister.

I really welcome this important debate put forward by Jane Dodds, and I'd like to thank Jane for agreeing to give me a minute of her time. I agree with her on many of the points raised today. The area I would like to focus on is the issue of school transport. Particularly, I'd like to see free school bus transport introduced, perhaps as a start, to both encourage more children to travel by bus to school, normalising that behaviour, but also to help families who can't keep up with the cost of school transport, many of whom feel that they have to drive their children instead. Every year, I receive e-mails from worried parents who are struggling to afford school bus costs. At a time when we know that families are facing a crippling cost-of-living crisis, it would both ease the burden while also encouraging a far more sustainable form of transport for our children and young people, helping to embed this behaviour. The school run contributes to congesting our streets every morning and afternoon, so let's tackle that by offering an attractive alternative: a more widely accessible free school bus transport system to supplement our safe routes to school. Once again, I'd like to thank Jane Dodds for this really important debate today.

I call on the Deputy Minister for Climate Change to reply to the debate. Lee Waters.

I'd like to thank the Member for tabling the debate and for the range of contributions from Members. As ever, when we debate public transport in this Senedd, there is cross-party interest and support for being more ambitious, and there's no denying the fact that free public transport is an attractive idea. To tackle climate change and reach the non-negotiable limit of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, it's essential that we make fewer car journeys and shift modes of transport to shared forms of mobility and to active travel. The question we're all grappling with is: how we do we do that? How do we change travel behaviour and attitudes and how do we rejig the transport machinery and infrastructure to help bring that about?

There's no doubt that incentives and disincentives will play a key role. As Julie James and I have been saying since we were appointed as Ministers for climate change last May, we need to make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do. But our transport and planning system has been shaped to make jumping in the car the easiest thing to do, and cycling, walking or using public transport less easy, and that has to change. Clearly, price has a role to play in how we incentivise public transport use. It certainly is not the only factor, though. Bus operators have been telling Senedd committees for years that the biggest barrier to attracting more passengers is the impact congestion has on journey times and reliability. A lack of integration between bus and rail is another barrier, as is changing habits. Fifty per cent of people never get on the bus. As a result, many of us have a skewed view of the reality of bus travel, its ease of use or its convenience. So, there's lots we need to change, but where to start and how to pay for it? Those are the questions that confront us.

In the French city of Dunkirk, they've certainly found that free bus use has been a success. In September 2018, they increased local business tax to fund free bus use and have seen the number of passengers increase by 60 per cent during the week and double on weekends. We've already trialled it ourselves with free weekend travel on our TrawsCymru strategic bus network between July 2017 and March 2020, and it was successful too in increasing usage. About a quarter of bus passengers were young people aged between 16 and 24, and when questioned, 73 per cent of young people told us that free travel would encourage them to make more journeys by public transport and switch from using the car. 

Dirprwy Lywydd, I take my hat off to Swansea, Cardiff and Newport councils—Labour councils—who have all offered free and discounted bus fare initiatives over the last year. They all saw more people hopping on buses as a result, and we're looking carefully with them at the evaluation reports. So, again, there's no doubt that free bus use is an attractive option. But, of course, it comes at a cost and every Government has to prioritise. I know Jane Dodds is not arguing for free bus use across the board, but targeted at young people. And there is precedence: we provide free bus travel for older people, and it has been a great success. We all recognise that young people in particular have had a hard time during the pandemic, and that a range of metrics are not having the same opportunities as my generation has, or my parents'.

We do offer some help already. Starting with the youngest, all children in Wales under 6 travel free by us, 16 to 21-year-olds receive a third discount on bus fares with the help of the Welsh Government's MyTravelPass scheme, as Jane Dodds referenced, and some young people are eligible for free travel with the help of our mandatory concessionary travel scheme. On rail, children under 11 can travel for free when they're with an adult, and under 16-year-olds can benefit from free off-peak travel with Transport for Wales. For those age 16 to 17, TfW offers a 50 per cent discount saver railcard off many tickets. And, of course, in Wales, we've retained the educational maintenance allowance, which provides students with valuable financial support towards living costs, including public transport fares.

To be clear, we want to do more, but it's also fair to point out that we are constrained. Our budget at the end of this Senedd term will be nearly £3 billion lower than if it had increased in line with the economy over the term of the UK Government since 2010. And we don't get our fair share of UK transport resources. We should all unite on this; this need not be a party point. If we had a share of the spending on the HS2 programme, we would get an extra £5 billion that we could use to radically improve transport in Wales. I do hope, again, that we can come together across parties to make a call to the UK Government to look at this again.

As a result of that, we can't do everything we'd like to, but we are determined to do more. In fact, our climate commitments demand that we do more. Our programme for government includes pledges to build on the success of our concessionary travel scheme for older people and to look at how fair fares can encourage integrated transport. Secondly, we've committed to exploring extensions to the MyTravelPass for reduced-cost travel for young people. I'm aware that over 100 towns and cities across the world have introduced free public transport for all citizens, and we're looking at these to see what will work best in Wales. We're also looking closely at the work in Scotland, which has been highlighted in the debate, in introducing free bus travel for under 22-year-olds.

Whilst fares are an important factor, I mentioned that the bus industry places greater emphasis on punctuality and reliability. Intriguingly, research last year by Passenger Focus showed that this is a view shared by young people in particular; they place higher value than other age groups on punctuality and reliability, the provision of free Wi-Fi on bus stops, along with value-for-money fares and being able to get a seat. So, Dirprwy Lywydd, these aren't straightforward judgments; there is no doubt that price is an important factor in getting more people on buses, but it's only one of a range of incentives and we have to carefully judge how we use our finite resource to bring about the modal shift that we're all committed to.

I'm not in a position to make announcements to the Senedd tonight, but I can assure Members that Julie James and I are working hard to ensure that we implement the new Wales transport strategy that we launched last year, to put Wales onto a llwybr newydd. Diolch.

Diolch, Dirprwy Weinidog. His contribution brings us to a close tonight. So, thank you, everyone, and have a safe journey to wherever you're going home. I've got to travel home.

The meeting ended at 18:26.