6. What support does the Welsh Government provide to deliver integrated public and community transport in the Ogmore constituency which meets the needs of transport-poor constituents? OQ58117

Can I thank Huw Irranca-Davies, Llywydd? Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have worked closely with the bus industry to keep services running, providing £130 million of additional funding to prevent communities from becoming isolated.

And that funding has indeed helped but, even before the pandemic, we'd had a decade of austerity that had impacted on local authorities and had impacted on cuts in services, including subsidised bus services. We're looking forward to the reforms that will give control back to people, I have to say—local communities and regions—to take control of co-ordinated bus services and wider public transport within their areas. But my question is about the here and now. We look to excellent initiatives like the Fflecsi bus schemes—community transport are involved in some of those. But what we fail to see is that joined-up-ness right at this moment. So, I have a direct question and ask of the First Minister—and I notice his colleague here, the Minister, is sitting right next to me—and it's whether he and his Minister would be willing to sit down with me and officials from Bridgend as well to look at how we can pull the very best of what's currently available so we can join this up, so we don't have hilltops like Maesteg park, remote Valleys communities, such as Pont-y-rhyl and others, who are isolated because of the cuts we've seen over the last decade and more, where we can really make sure that everybody who wants to get to see their friends, wants to get to the shops, to the surgery and so on can do so. What can we do right now? Could you help us with that?

Well, I thank Huw Irranca-Davies for that, Llywydd. He's right that the long-term answer—and by 'long term' I mean during this Senedd term—is the radical reform of bus services that we will bring forward through the bus Bill, to reverse those 30 and more years of marketisation in the bus industry, which has left communities of the sort that Huw Irranca-Davies has referred to without a service because there isn't a commercial case for doing so. And yet millions of pounds of public money is put into the bus service every year here in Wales. I hope I'm not anticipating an announcement that my colleague was about to make, but on top of the £130 million that we have provided to sustain bus services during the pandemic, I know that my colleague has agreed a further £43 million to go on sustaining those bus services over the rest of this calendar year, and that does give an opportunity to do what the Member for Ogmore has suggested. I know that Bridgend County Borough Council has been one of those councils where reductions in funding from the UK Government has constrained their ability to sustain those community services, but now, with a new Labour-controlled authority in Bridgend, it will be a very good moment to meet and to discuss with the local authority how that investment that we will provide can go on making a difference to the places that the Member has highlighted this afternoon.