Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:53 pm on 30 March 2022.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 1:53, 30 March 2022

The purpose of these deep dives—and I must say I'm rather going off the title as it's beginning to sound a little pretentious; as I've said, if we keep having deep dives like these, we'll end up with the bends—is a rapid review of barriers, and they start as an open-ended process. In the ones that I've carried out on woodland creation and renewable energy, and I'm now doing something similar on town centres, it's the process rather than the outcome that starts off predesigned. So, we get a range of people in a room, and we meet intensively over a short period. We have a mix of voices. We have people who are practitioners, we have people who are academics and policy experts, and we have some deliberately awkward characters—and I think this is a really important part of the mix—to really create some challenge and some tension. Then we ask them to go with us to identify what they believe, given their experience, are the principal barriers and the main issues. And then, the key challenge from the Minister to them—and it'll be Julie James leading the biodiversity one—is to get them to translate their criticism into practical action. It's very easy for observers to tell us what's wrong; what is harder is to come up with practical policies that can make a difference. That's what we've done successfully, I think, in the other deep dives, and that's what we'll be seeking to do with this one that Julie James will be leading. So, it's impossible to anticipate what it'll come up with, because that is the whole point—we don't know. But we will be relying on an alliance for change to work with us to identify practical steps.