Questions now from the party leaders. The leader of the Welsh Conservatives, Andrew R.T. Davies. 

Thank you, Presiding Officer. First Minister, last month, numerous media outlets reported the discovery of the coal tip campaigner's damning document from 2014, which suggested that the Welsh Government at the time was prioritising the economy over safety where funding work would make a big difference to coal tips in the Valleys. This document says that the funding to reclaim coal tips was unlikely to be provided by Labour Ministers unless there was a business case. Specifically, it identifies Tylorstown tip, which was involved in a dangerous landslide in the devastating wake of storm Dennis in 2020, as one with stability issues for which there was no funding. You were obviously not the First Minister during this period, but you were of course a member of the Government. Do you regret the decision and the way this was handled by the Government at the time, First Minister?

Llywydd, there was no such decision.

Well, there's an awful lot of politics being played by your Government in particular when it comes to funding and the safety of coal tips, First Minister, but the responsibility is devolved. It was actually your party in the original devolution settlement that devolved this responsibility, albeit I do accept that there are issues around legacy. Nevertheless, this could be funded and resolved by now.

The funding for the airport, for example, could have been used on coal tips, some £200 million plus. That is money that you chose to put into another project that could have been used to make coal tips safe in the Valleys. So, First Minister, given the substantial increase—. I can see you laughing, First Minister, but there are many communities in the Valleys who look at this as a nightmare situation for them and cannot sleep at night. So, you might chuckle, standing in this Chamber, First Minister, but it's not a laughing matter. You have the responsibility—

Just get on with the question.

Well, there's no need to bite back, First Minister. You have the responsibility. You have the responsibility, you had the money and you had the choice to do it. Why haven't you done it?

Well, Llywydd, what the Member has to say is absurd. He starts off with an accusation that turns out not to be true at all. There was never a funding application turned down by the Welsh Government because a funding application was never made. So, that's the first piece of nonsense that we should lay to rest this afternoon.

Then, the absurd suggestion that investment in the airport in Cardiff—and, of course, an investment that his party has always opposed, never interested in making sure that there is that essential piece of infrastructure for our nation available to us—that that could somehow have been diverted to coal tip safety.

Let me reply to his original point. The programme that he referred to was a programme set up under a Conservative Government in the 1980s, it was run by the Welsh Development Agency and it depended upon a business case. Well, fancy that, before you spend public money, you need a business case; £4.5 billion-worth, of course, of fraud leading to the resignation of a Tory Minister in London, without a business case in sight. We understand the way that his party goes about these responsibilities. Here in Wales, if you're spending public money, of course you would expect there to be a business case.

The truth of the matter as far as coal tip safety in Wales is concerned is this, Llywydd, that the standards that were required in the 1980s and 1990s are no longer suitable in an era of climate change. We've seen over the last two winters the effect of extreme weather events in Valleys communities. The UK Government has a responsibility to put right the legacy that we have seen here in Wales and they have refused to provide a single penny piece. That is the truth of the matter. No nonsense about airport money being spent of coal tip remediation will disguise the fact that the responsibility for putting right the legacy that we see in Wales—with all the history that we have here in Wales, with all the fear that that engenders in Valleys communities—relies on a UK Conservative Government, and the answer they give is, 'There's not a penny piece to help.'

You know full well that the UK Government have made money available for coal tip restoration, First Minister, so you've misled the Assembly there by saying 'not a penny piece' has been made available. But I would say to you, First Minister, when you talk about business cases, the business case for taking over the airport didn't prove very sound, did it? But, you've invested nearly £200 million in the airport, and continue to have to bail it out, time and time again. That would have been a significant down-payment on making coal tips safe across the Valleys communities. 

Now, I'm prepared to work with you, First Minister, on this to make sure that communities the length and breadth of the Valleys can sleep easy at night and have those tips made safe by working with colleagues at both ends of the M4. But, to date, you have not brought a timetable forward and you have not lived up to your responsibilities. So, will you commit to working with me to make sure that we can put a timetable in place, so that communities that your backbenchers represent can have that safety and that confidence that the Government here is working in their best interest? Because it is your responsibility. That was part of the devolution settlement and the choices you made have not made that money available to make coal tips safe here in Wales, First Minister. 

Llywydd, there is a timetable in place, it's the timetable drawn up by the non-devolved Coal Authority, acting under the direction of the committee that I jointly chair with the Secretary of State for Wales. I don't need any lessons from the leader of the opposition here about working with others when I co-chair the group with the Secretary of State that has overseen this work. We have funded, however, not the UK Government, we have funded the extra work of the Coal Authority, and the Coal Authority tell us that the timetable is a 10-year timetable, that it will require between £500 million and £600 million over that period in order to carry out the remediation of coal tips in Wales, where the current standards are not fit for an era where climate change produces the sorts of impacts that we have seen in Tylorstown and in other parts of Valleys communities in the last two years.

So, the timetable is there. The work that's needed is there. What we lack is a single penny towards it. Now, the Member says I mislead the Senedd, which I don't take very kindly to, Llywydd, because I can tell you that I did not do anything of the sort. The money that we have received from the UK Government was to help with the emergency work that was necessary in Tylorstown. It is not a penny piece towards that long-term programme that the Coal Authority has recommended is necessary here in Wales. When the UK Government comes to the table to help Welsh communities, they will find a willing partner. In the meantime, this Senedd will have to find that money because I will not see coal communities go without the remediation that they require, and that money will have to come from money that otherwise is provided to us for schools, for hospitals, for transport infrastructure and all the other things that are devolved to this Senedd. And that's the solution that his Government, in the letters that they write to me, proposes that we should implement. 

Leader of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price.

Thank you, Llywydd. First Minister, on Thursday evening last week I attended a public meeting in my constituency called in light of the purchase of the local Frongoch farm by the Foresight investment fund in order to plant trees and gain carbon credits. There was a young family there who had made a proposal to purchase the farm and to farm the land, until Foresight offered a substantially higher sum for the land. And I'm sorry to have to say this, First Minister, but it's not a pantomime when a whole community is gazumped; it is a tragedy. There was passion in this meeting and the famous words of Gwenallt about a nearby village echoed the meeting, 

And now there is nothing there but trees... / Trees where there was community, / A forest where there were farms.

The Farmers Union of Wales and the NFU have this morning provided us with information that does suggest that this is happening at a substantial scale, particularly in Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Powys. Is the Government willing to review this information as a matter of urgency in order to find the real scale of the problem?

Well, of course, Llywydd, any information that helps us to see the scale of the problem will be helpful. The information that I have goes like this: 

In the first 10 windows of the Glastir woodland creation scheme, there were 1,121 beneficiaries. Thirty five of those had addresses outside Wales, and amongst those 35 are organisations like the Woodland Trust. Now, if there is further information that is available through the farming unions, then of course that would be very helpful, and I look forward to receiving it. 

Two years ago, Professor John Healey and his team at the school of forest sciences in Bangor University published a report commissioned by you as a Government, which set out two scenarios of possible ownership for the future of forestry in Wales. The first scenario, and I will quote in English: 

'transfer of larger land units...from agriculture to forestry...through the sale of whole agricultural land holdings...to forestry investors. This may cause concerns of loss agricultural cultural values and sub-optimal use of land resources'.

And the second scenario: 

'smaller forest blocks within continuing agricultural land holdings as part of a strategy towards diversification of income streams for farm holdings. Such smaller and more isolated woodland patches may also have advantages for reducing risk of tree pathogen infection' and

'capitalise on and enhance existing social capital in the farming sector, through co-operative management'.

Is the Welsh Government willing to commit to support the second model and to oppose the first?

Well, I think, Llywydd, that the history of what we've done over recent years shows that the second suggestion is the one that we have pursued. What we want to see is Welsh farmers leading the way, Welsh farmers planting trees and ownership remaining local.

If every farmer in Wales were to plant 25 hectares of woodland, so, not the first solution that the Member—. Sorry, 5 hectares of woodland, I beg your pardon. If every farmer planted 5 hectares of woodland—mixed woodland, broadleaved woodland for carbon capture and productive woodland for house building here in Wales—we'd be well on our way to reaching the targets that we have to reach here in Wales because of climate change, while keeping wealth and control local. That would be exactly the sort of pattern that the Welsh Government would wish to see in future.

Carbon asset stripping is a global phenomenon. Just before Christmas, the Australian Government proposed a ministerial veto on woodland carbon-credit developments over 15 hectares or where they make up more than a third of a farm. Are you prepared to consider amending the planning system or introducing a social and linguistic dimension to the impact assessment process to prevent conifer and spruce doing to our agricultural communities what second homes have done to our coastal ones?

The lesson of the second homes experience is that you cannot afford to wait. Once the agricultural land is lost, it will never come back. Once the carbon credits, so vital in our own journey to net zero, are extracted from Wales, they will never return. Will you examine urgently the proposal, again in a Welsh Government-commissioned report from 2014, of a Welsh carbon credit market, which would mean that credits generated by Welsh forestry could only ever be utilised by entities based in Wales?

Llywydd, I know that Adam Price will know that the Minister responsible has already established an expert group of people to help us to see how we can bring further investment into woodland creation in Wales in a way that does not lead to the sorts of damage that he identified, and he'll know that that group has many interests represented on it—Llais y Goedwig, Woodknowledge Wales, as well as experts like Professor Karel Williams of Manchester University.

That group has provided its recommendations to the Welsh Government, and it has a series of proposals that Ministers were discussing only last week: to reduce payment rates in the new woodland creation scheme for non-farmers, for example, to make sure that the money goes to people who are active farmers on the land here in Wales; the option of reducing payments in the new woodland creation scheme for people getting carbon credits, to deal with the point that the Member raised; and work to define less productive woodland, so that there is a future for Welsh farming in which it makes its contribution, through tree planting, to dealing with climate change, but does not intrude on land that could be used for productive, commercially saleable food production as well.

Now, that report does not recommend changes to the planning system, believing that it would be an ineffective way of dealing with the issues that the report was asked to respond to. But Ministers will take that forward, together with other ideas that are available from other sources, in order, as I said, to make sure that what we achieve here in Wales is tree planting on the scale that the Climate Change Committee recommends to us. The Climate Change Committee says that we must plant 86 million trees in Wales over the next decade, if we are to achieve net zero not by 2035 but by 2050. If we're to do that, we can only do it with the enthusiastic support of Welsh agriculture. In order to do that and to keep the support of communities of the sort that the Member referred to—and I was interested to hear about his meeting with local people in the Cwrt-y-cadno area—of course we have to make sure that we have that investment in a way that is owned locally. And I don't mean just physically owned, I mean owned in the sense of people wanting to support it as well, because that is the way in which we will be able to make sure that we meet our climate change ambitions without doing harm to local communities and the future of Welsh farming.