Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:49 pm on 8 November 2022.
I'm grateful, Deputy Presiding Officer, and grateful to you, Minister, for your statement this afternoon. You made some very powerful statements at the beginning of your statement about the place of coal in our history and not our future. But there are, of course, already some consents and permissions within the system. Can you confirm—? I don't want to tempt you into making any comment on individual applications, but can you confirm that it is not the policy of this Government to allow any further extraction of coal at any time in the future?
It would be useful, I think, to have a statement on nuclear and its place in the overall energy mix. As you know, I'm a very strong supporter of the place of nuclear in the energy mix, and the points you made about base-load supply I think are well made, and nuclear does provide that. But we need a conversation about how we take that forward, particularly given the failures of UK Government on nuclear policy in the last decade or so.
But, finally, Minister, I'd like to push you a bit further, if I could, on the nature of Welsh Government policy. I don't want to see us adopting an approach whereby we say we want renewables and therefore we will accept anything to achieve that simple objective. I don't want to see my Valleys, the Valleys in the upper part of Gwent that I represent, having enormous developments imposed upon us in order to achieve a target that is determined elsewhere. What I would like to see is a very different vision of local generation—