8. Welsh Conservatives Debate: The transport network

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:07 pm on 22 June 2022.

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Photo of Peter Fox Peter Fox Conservative 5:07, 22 June 2022

Minister, you will be pleased that we don't disagree with you on that, and we will continue to make that position clear from our benches. But a Government should not continue to divest itself of responsibilities from areas and blame somebody else all the time. Twenty-three years you have been in place. Okay, you may not have had all of the levers all of the time, but you had enough time to create a strategy that could deliver for the people of Wales. And whilst you've got your visionary document, it doesn't deliver in the ways that it needs to deliver as we move forward. I mean, on some of the things that you pointed out, Minister, you talked about the desire for more cycle lanes and active travel. Well, the reality is you cannot run freight up cycle lanes—you cannot—and we have not got a rail infrastructure to convert our lorries onto rail. We still need a robust system to enable our transport to get around. And the road-building ban has caused some significant issues, as was pointed out earlier on, and we can see things like—I'll point to my own area—the Chepstow bypass put on hold. Yet, the road feeding from the A48 into Chepstow, Hardwick Hill—the most polluted road in Wales since Hafodyrynys has been removed—definitely needs us to think on pollution grounds alone to continue that project to do a bypass around Chepstow. That's very clear.

And I think it's also a timely opportunity for us to review how the metros—both metros—are going to impact on rural communities, because metro is a multimodal model of thinking, so what will we see in the likes of Monmouthshire, in Powys, in Gwynedd. What do we see? Will we see rapid bus transit? What's the progress on delivering that? Are we going to see integrated ticketing rolled out in the very near future to join up those public transport elements? We're not seeing them, and yet, these people are suffering now because we're embarking on this expectation to get us all on our bikes, all out of our cars, but the reality is that that cannot happen now. [Interruption.]