Cardiff to Anglesey Flights

Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:15 pm on 15 June 2022.

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Photo of Darren Millar Darren Millar Conservative 3:15, 15 June 2022

I'm glad, frankly, that the Welsh Government has finally woken up and smelt the coffee. I told you back in 2010 that this service was not good value for money for the taxpayer, and that alternatives needed to kick in. In fact, I've spoken about a number of alternatives that you could have looked at over the years, including an opportunity for the plane to hop to a number of different destinations in order to make it more commercially viable, including through Anglesey, say to the Isle of Man, Anglesey and Cardiff. I put that proposal forward, you didn't listen. You didn't listen. You didn't listen either when I said that this service would be better placed in north-east Wales, where the majority of the population in north Wales actually live. You didn't listen. You didn't listen either when I said you should have put this air link into somewhere like Liverpool or Manchester, connecting the north of England, the powerhouse that is the north of England, with our economy here in south Wales. But you didn't listen. Those could have been commercially viable options that would have kept an air service available to the people of north Wales for them to be able to use in order for them to be able to access Cardiff, but you didn't listen.

So, will you listen now, when I say to you: will you look at working with other airlines as potential partners to try to establish some of those alternatives, to make sure that north Wales does have those good transport links that we need to be able to have with south Wales? And will you also look at the disparity in transport spending from your Government here in Wales? You're spending hundreds of millions of pounds on roads in the south of the country and paltry amounts, frankly, on the transport network in north Wales. You're spending peanuts, and I say peanuts, in terms of the cash that you're putting into the north Wales metro, at £50 million compared to £750 million in south Wales. We need some better levelling up of our transport infrastructure in north Wales, and we've not got it at the moment. So, why don't you look at making sure that your capital infrastructure is spent more evenly across the country, and take the opportunity to see whether there are potential airline partners who can establish commercially viable links that can serve the people of north Wales, helping to connect them to the south in a way that your publicly subsidised service, frankly, could not?