Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:43 pm on 30 March 2022.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 1:43, 30 March 2022

Well, Llywydd, there are two separate points to address there, and I'll try and address them both. On the first, I was present yesterday afternoon during business questions, and I heard the quite harrowing accounts by the Member of the experience she and fellow passengers had had, and I was very sorry to hear it. I met with the chair and the chief executive of Transport for Wales straight afterwards to discuss it. Clearly, it's not right that just because there happened to be politicians on the train that there is a response, but there were a number of Members there who were able to give first-hand testimony, and I took it very seriously, and particularly the accounts of members of the public not able to attend a funeral and having trouble with their jobs. So, Transport for Wales are taking this very seriously. There was a problem with the train leaving a maintenance depot—not a TfW maintenance depot—but then it ceased to function once it hit a certain point, and that caused then a cascade of problems. So, I'm very keen, as are they, to use the exercise to learn lessons, particularly around the communications. There do seem to be some significant failings in the way the messaging was dealt with. So, I've had a very constructive and robust conversation with TfW about this, and we are both keen to learn from it to make sure we can try and prevent this from happening again. And I'd like to reiterate the apology that I gave to all members of the public who were on that train. Things will happen from time to time on the railways, but it's how we respond to them, I think, is the mark of it, and I hope that we can certainly learn the lessons from that. 

On the issue of energy security, I must disagree with the characterisation of Janet Finch-Saunders of the UK Government's response. The way we develop energy security is not just to wean ourselves off Russian oil, but to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. We not only face a short-term energy crisis, we face a parallel climate crisis, and digging more oil out of the North sea, which is what the UK Government is proposing to do, flies in the face of all the science, flies in the face of what the Prime Minister was saying not months ago in Glasgow. All of a sudden, his video-tape memory has been wiped clean yet again and he's learned none of the lessons of the past. What we need is a rapid deployment of renewables across the UK, both at a housing level—to have solar energy on every house, on every building, as well as energy efficiency—and the range of micro, hydro and generation technologies that we know work, we know are cost-effective, and we know are making a greater part of the energy mix. That is a major mistake.

In terms of her criticism that our moves on marine are not quick, then the idea that deploying nuclear energy is going to happen at speed is rather fanciful. It is neither cheap nor clean nor quick, I would say to her. We take a pragmatic view on nuclear. In north Wales, we know it provides innovation and economic development, and is part of the energy mix whilst we scale up renewables rapidly. But it is a short-term fix. For the UK Government to seize on that as a response to the energy crisis I think is misguided. I'll repeat what I said to Altaf Hussain earlier: the removal by the UK Government of the feed-in tariff in 2019, the moratorium on onshore wind, and the failure to support the Swansea tidal lagoon are historic errors. We've had a lost decade. Rather than getting ourselves resilient with true energy security and a renewable system, they've continued our dependence on Russian oil and gas, and look where it's got us.