I very much echo the sentiments of my colleague Natasha Asghar. Hailing from a rural community, I have seen very good public transport, but, far too often, I’ve seen the very poorest of what’s on offer to the people of Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire. Indeed, if you follow the Welsh Government's advice to ditch your car, you are completely and utterly dependent on sporadic timetabling and infrequent access to public transport services. And for some, that’s the difference between arriving on time for a job interview, making that important hospital appointment, or clocking into a shift on time.

Now, there is a bit of a perverse irony from the Welsh Government in calling on my constituents—on our constituents—to ditch their cars and catch the bus instead, yet not take any fundamental steps to ensure that transport services in Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire are fit for the twenty-first century. This narrative just simply doesn’t mirror the policy output and the action of this Welsh Government and, when Welsh Government does inevitably fail, it is local people who pay the price.

But, by now, I’m sure the Minister will know of the level of discontent from the people of west Wales, and born from this frustration emerged SPRAG, following a meeting I convened and hosted with disgruntled rail users as a consequence of inadequate rail services between Pembroke Dock and Whitland and the stations in between—Narberth, Tenby and Pembroke to name a few. Those local rail users continued the discussion and have joined forces to launch the south Pembrokeshire rail action group, a group of dedicated volunteers who are working cross-party to campaign for improvements to rail connectivity to and within rural south Pembrokeshire. Yet the very presence of this organisation and others like it, forced together by inadequacy and inaction, is a direct admission of the transport failures of this Welsh Government.

Because of delay and poor connectivity in west Wales, frustrated local people have taken it upon themselves to achieve change, change that shouldn’t be necessary if this Government believed in a Wales that existed outside of south Wales. But this is about more than just getting from X to Y. When we connect towns to villages, and villages to communities, we aren’t just ensuring travel to and from a location; we are delivering prosperity and creating jobs. If you can travel between your village and the local town centre, you instantly create a whole array of new opportunities, not just for that individual, but for the location as well.

And we’ve seen, first-hand, this in Saundersfoot and Tenby. As a consequence of not being able to travel by public transport to these locations, local businesses were left with huge employment shortfalls, especially the case when it comes to the employment of our young people. Local restaurants struggled to reopen after the pandemic, seaside hotels were left without enough staff to clean rooms, and start-up businesses were forced into operating with reduced hours. Whilst this situation has been seen across the country, as we exit two years of enforced isolation, the problem has been made worse by the inability of businesses to fill employment gaps due to any worker employed outside of the traditional nine-to-six employment hours being unable to access transport to and from work.

And if you consider the number of jobs servicing the night-time economy and hospitality industry in towns such as Saundersfoot and Tenby, then you begin to appreciate how much of a challenge this failure begins to present. So, I return to the point about improving rural transport connectivity. We aren’t just debating the importance of buses on our roads, or trains on our tracks, but the wider issue, created by Government inaction, of how a failure to support a rural, public transport network impacts on businesses, employment and tourism. If the Welsh Government changes tack and invests in west Wales’s transport services, then we can ensure that every community is connected, which can change the outlook and life chances for those who live in those communities for the better. Diolch.