Diolch, Ddirprwy Lywydd. What was the cost of coal to the Valleys? What price was demanded of our people to pay for the wealth others had taken? Do we measure that cost in bodies buried? Should it be calculated in lost livelihoods, lost limbs, in lungs thick with disease and dust? Or do we measure it in the muck and dirt taken from the ground and left to pock and scar our skyline?

Across Wales, there are more than 2,000 disused coal tips and tips—an ugly legacy, a potent symbol of what was taken from us. We've become used to them blocking our view. You visit almost any Valleys town and you'll find a tip looming above it, like a spectre in a nightmare. But since the Tylorstown landslide in 2020, that near miss that might have been so catastrophic—since that day, we've awakened again to the risk these tips pose. No longer just an eyesore, but next-door nightmares, muted time bombs that might go off at any moment.

More than 300 tips in Wales are classed as being high risk. We don't know where all of them are, which is why our motion calls for local authorities to be asked to release information about the location of the tips, to promote trust and accountability. We agree with the Law Commission that this information should be made public. We call for early warning systems to be developed, funded and rolled out so that communities can be warned about potential tip failures, just like with other natural disasters like earthquakes. Remote monitors that are used to pick up volcanic activity and tsunamis would sense landslips and raise the alarm, and people living in the vicinity could receive alerts on their mobile phones. These systems would be a godsend, and I'd ask the Minister in his response to provide an update on any roll-out of these systems and how they would be funded.

Our motion talks about the reclamation of the sites where the tips are located, and about the need for a national regeneration plan for these areas so long starved of investment or care. Because deindustrialisation in Wales, in the UK, didn't follow the pattern seen elsewhere in Europe. In France and Germany, redundancies were planned and miners offered training opportunities in sectors like civil engineering. But in the UK, as one former senior executive of the European Coal and Steel Community has put it, 'They look no further than to pension off the miner'. The National Coal Board and Thatcher's Government used redundancy to force agreement on mine closures, and miners were betrayed. No thought was given to the toll unemployment would take on entire communities. And when the mines closed, something of the spirit of these towns went with them, and so one of the most important thriving social and political forces in the history of Wales. The might of the miners all but vanished overnight. Because miners were so much more than what they did underground. There was a camaraderie, of course, a bond that bound men together. But above ground, those forces enriched the towns in the miners halls, eisteddfodau, the libraries, the educational drive and town-hall meeting culture, all led by miners and their families. They may have worked below ground, but their sights were set on the sky.

In one of his poems, Harri Webb reminisces about the colliers coming out of the cwbs at Caeharris station. Men, they said, with 90 per cent dust, who could hit top C as if it never existed. The sacrifices those men made, Dirprwy Lywydd, the horrors they endured, and still they sang. 

Until the Aberfan disaster in the 1960s, no legislation was in place to provide for the management of coal tips. It took that disaster and the deaths of 28 adults and 116 children for Westminster to consider the death traps they'd laid above our heads. But the Mines and Quarries Act is no longer fit for this purpose. It was enacted when mines were still operational, and the standards that were required in the 1980s and 1990s are no longer suitable in an era of climate change. There is no duty to ensure the safety of coal tips, and councils have no power to intervene until there are concerns that a tip is unstable. We shouldn't be waiting for another near-disaster to happen before preventative measures are taken.

And who should foot the bill? Westminster conveniently argues that this is a devolved matter. They don't much like devolution up there except for when it gets them out of paying their dues. Dirprwy Lywydd, you cannot devolve the past; you cannot use time travel to avoid awkward truths. These tips are a legacy of an industrial past that fuelled the Royal Navy's fleet, that powered railways, made British industrialists rich and that kept the miners and their communities in poverty. Coal created unimaginable wealth. The first million-pound deal in the history of the world was struck in the Coal Exchange in Cardiff off the back of Valleys coal. But none of it was spent in Bargoed or in Brythdir. Our valleys had coal deposits, but what deposits were laid for our future? They brokered a deal with Mammon, mortgaged the miners' health and their safety to get the quick and easy profits from the pits, but the repayment on that mortgage wasn't one paid by pit owners or shareholders. It is beyond the realms of reason, of morality, of any question of truth or decency to argue that an institution that did not exist when the men laboured and died should pay to clean up the mess that those industrialists left behind—the dust that blots out the sky in the same way it choked their lungs.

We are talking about significant sums of money, of course. The Coal Authority has estimated that the cost of making tips safe will be between £500 million and £600 million over the next decade. But is it really seemly to squabble about that payment? Because these valleys have too long been short changed and robbed of decency. In 1913—and I'll close with this, Dirprwy Lywydd—439 miners and one rescuer lost their lives in the Senghenydd colliery disaster, the worst mining disaster in British history. There was an inquiry, punishments were imposed, the manager paid a fine of £24, the colliery company paid £10. It was calculated that approximately one shilling had to be paid for every man and boy who died. In today's money, that would amount to £13. I've heard it said that widows weren't even paid the full day's wages for the day that the miners died, because they had died before their shift had ended. This is the legacy we are talking about—the toll taken by coal on our communities. Westminster has a chance here to do one small thing to make good on their debt, outstanding as it is, the debt they owe to those miners and their towns—a chance to make a payment, an acknowledgement, so that, in the company of those memories, they should no longer be ashamed. In all decency, dear God, they should take it.