Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:45 pm on 21 September 2022.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 1:45, 21 September 2022

I appreciate the Member will have written that down before she had a chance to listen to what I said and the challenge that I gave to her. I don't accept the premise of her point. The movement of goods and people is clearly critical. That is not currently possible because we have congestion. You don't solve congestion by building more roads. There's ample international evidence that if you build more road capacity, you encourage more traffic, which leads to greater congestion and then demands for more road building. And we've been doing that for over 50 years. They shake their heads, but I'd like to see the evidence they have to contradict what I've just said. The academic research on that is absolutely clear. And if we can remove traffic from the roads that doesn't need to be there, that, in fact, opens up space for the freight sector. 

We obviously want to see freight shifting from roads onto railways where that's possible, but failure to adequately invest in the railways by the Conservative Government in Wales, where we are £5 billion short of investment—which, again, if they were sincere in their views, they would acknowledge—has hampered our ability to achieve modal shift from road to rail for freight. But it's simply not the case that we have inadequate roads at the moment. What we have not been doing is sufficiently investing in maintaining existing roads. And one of the objectives of the roads review is to look at how we could move investment away from building new roads to look after the ones we have and, as we do it, encourage modal shift. 

I again say to the Member on the benches opposite, you've signed up to net zero by 2050, 17 per cent of emissions come from transport—how do you plan to cut those emissions so that we meet our targets? I wait to hear your answer.