Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 8 February 2023.
Thank you, Llywydd. I want to start by acknowledging that there's a great deal of work going on at the moment with public transport services in Wales. The recent report by the North Wales Transport Commission was very interesting, for example, with one particular interesting statistic, which stated that two-thirds of the journeys of people in north Wales were 15 km or less, but that data was heavily weighted towards the more populated areas obviously.
A number of metro schemes are also in the pipeline, and if we look again at north Wales, there is significant talk there about developing train links from Llandudno and Wrexham to Liverpool and Manchester. The Swansea bay metro in south-west Wales talks about the urban centres, again. But what is notable in all of this is the total absence of plans for rural Wales. Where are Ceredigion, Powys, most of Gwynedd, and the heartlands in these metro programmes? So, what are the Government's ambitions in ensuring that residents in rural Wales can access public transport?