Can I thank my colleague, Darren Millar, for submitting today's debate on the roads review, and also Natasha Asghar for opening today's debate? It's clear, from our side of the benches here, we believe that the Welsh Government's roads review is very badly thought out, to say the least.

In my contribution today, I'd firstly like to highlight the sheer impact that this review will have on residents who I represent in north Wales. As we regretfully know, north Wales is set to miss out massively due to this review. We know that 16 projects were lined up for north Wales, 15 of these will now either be stopped or scrapped altogether. All major road building and upgrade projects across my region of north Wales have been stopped. This review, for my residents, is absolutely staggering. Amongst the scrapped projects are upgrades to the A483 Wrexham bypass, the A494 Lôn Fawr, Ruthin and Corwen roads, the A483 Halton roundabout, the A55 at junctions 15 to 16 and 32 to 33, as well as the third Menai crossing.

The Welsh Labour Government will again tell us today that this road building ban is vital to protect the environment and reduce carbon emissions, but what they again fail to understand is that, for many of my residents in north Wales, private road transport is the only practical transport option, with around 84 per cent of people in Wales relying on car or motorbike to go about their ordinary daily lives, and with these vehicles getting cleaner and greener with a rapid shift away from the internal combustion engine. As point 3 of today's motion states, this roads review does nothing to deliver the transport infrastructure that the people of Wales, and the residents I represent in north Wales, rightfully deserve.

Of course, this roads review outcome would've been received with much more warmth if we had sufficient and appropriate levels of public transport in my region of north Wales. But the people of north Wales know that this simply isn't the case, and as evidence of this, we know that 11,000 train services were cancelled by Transport for Wales over the last three years, and over £2 million was paid out in compensation to those passengers since 2018. And, as we know, the north Wales metro project was announced seven years ago now, yet, the prospect of an integrated north Wales-wide public transport network seems as distant as ever for the residents I represent. All whilst we continue to see significant amounts of investment channelled into the metro schemes in south Wales—that's so far away from what we're seeing in the north. 

As outlined by the Confederation of British Industry Wales, when looking at supporting our environment, we need to work on solutions that don't damage the Welsh economy at the same time. The two can work together. We need to see initiatives that support the environment also benefiting jobs, making sure that people have jobs that they can be proud to work in.