Diolch yn fawr iawn, Dirprwy Lywydd, and thank you to all colleagues for a stimulating debate. I think there is common cause, again, in this Chamber, for improving the reality of public transport and for achieving our shared aspiration of modal shift to tackle not just the climate crisis but also social justice. It's a little frustrating, and I'm aware of the irony, for me to hear this afternoon the list of issues Members raised that I agree with and have for many years been making myself, and now find myself in the position of trying to operationalise the challenge into solutions, and these things are all clearly easier said than done. 

We face a number of pressures at the moment. We have rising costs—so, every scheme we operate is costing more to deliver—and we have reducing funding, which is very frustrating, at a time when, clearly, the public transport sector, both rail and bus, has not recovered from the pandemic. So, it is costing more to run services. And we have saved the private bus industry from bankruptcy continually through the pandemic, through our bus emergency support scheme. That now faces renewal in the coming months, and we have less money. I really do worry about the impact the funding is going to have in shrinking our bus network. And as Members have pointed out, the bus industry is having problems of its own recruiting and retaining bus drivers, as well as with rising fuel costs, and my concern is that these services are often not operating already, and Sioned Williams has given us a good example in Pontypridd—forgive me, it was Heledd Fychan that gave us the example in Pontypridd—of buses not turning up. So, quite clearly, bus companies are struggling to maintain their current timetable, and my worry is that, as we have to pare back the bus emergency scheme, because we're coming out of the pandemic and the funding just isn't available, they will simply blame us for shrinking the bus network when of course it's us that saved the bus network in the first place. This, I think, goes to the heart of the failures of the privatised model that we have.

Alun Davies raised again the excellent example of the problem of the Grange hospital, where a hospital was built in the first place without public transport being thought of. Here, we have the disconnect between different services, where transport often isn't thought about by education or health providers until too late. And he talks about the specific—[Interruption.] Can I just answer the point first? He makes the specific point of a bus service not being available from Blaenau Gwent to the Grange, and that again is the cause of much frustration. We've discussed it a number of times, and the truth of the matter is we have tried to put in place a service to go from his constituency to the Grange, but we've been frustrated by the way the market works. If there is a publicly funded bus service in place that competes with a commercially run service, the operators are able to challenge us legally, and that is what has happened in this case. We've tried to put the service in place. A provider that provides a very small part of the route has challenged us on that, and as a result there is paralysis and it's Alun Davies's constituents who are suffering. It's not good enough, and it's extremely frustrating that the legal framework stops us providing an integrated public transport service, as it does on Natasha Asghar's much cited single ticket, as she well knows, or certainly ought to. The way that the current legal system is set up makes it impossible to do that, and that's why we are looking to reform the system through the bus Bill, and I welcome the support she has given consistently to a bus Bill, and I look forward to trying to shape that on a cross-party basis to achieve our shared ambition. So, there are some fundamental problems that we have plans and are working hard to address around the legal framework for the bus industry.

I though the exchange between Jenny Rathbone and Alun Davies was a very useful one, and I think this Chamber is at its best when people put down their speeches and respond to the debate, which is what I'm going to try and do this afternoon, because the points they both made were absolutely on point. Jenny Rathbone is right: we do need to discourage people from taking journeys into city centres when there are existing alternatives available, and we want to create better alternatives. And hats off to Cardiff Council for having the courage to develop a scheme of congestion charging, which they will hypothecate to a so-called crossrail project in Cardiff to improve metro public transport services in Cardiff. That's the right thing to do. It's politically challenging, but it's the right thing to do and we're working with them.

Alun Davies is also right that the services for his constituents currently are sometimes not there, and they're certainly not good enough to provide people with a realistic alternative. I, myself, have the novelty of having given up my second car, and I'm trying to get around by electric bike and train. And I can tell you it's tricky. It is frustrating, it is often inconvenient, and that is, I'm afraid, the reality—not for all journeys; for some journeys it's brilliant. But there'll be times with an unplanned journey, or there will be times when the trains don't turn up because of staff shortages, because of the weather, for all sorts of legitimate reasons, where, as a passenger, it is very frustrating. And unless we change that reality, we're never going to hit our modal shift target and we're never going to hit our climate change target. I see Alun Davies wants to intervene, I'd be happy for him to.