7. Welsh Conservatives Debate: The roads review

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:09 pm on 8 March 2023.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 5:09, 8 March 2023

This is not about the airport—[Interruption.] Well, we don't have aeroplanes running on roads, and this is about roads. This is about having more coherent criteria for why we are going to invest in the carbon emissions created by roads. So, the new criteria: shifting transport to sustainable transport. So, prioritising—the hierarchy of sustainable transport is prioritising active travel and cycling; reducing casualties on the roads, nobody's going to argue against that, and adapting roads to the impact of climate change. So, ensuring that, where we are having to change the road network, we are enhancing the hedges and edges strategy around wildlife and minimising any impact that they have on nature. And then supporting prosperity by making sure that developed sites achieve high sustainable transport mode share. And that is the rationale behind the decision to approve 17 of the projects that these experts looked at and to chuck out many others that are simply just replicating the old way of doing things. 

So, for example, there was a proposal to build a bypass, enhance a bypass around Wrexham just to accommodate a private development of new housing that had clearly been put in the wrong place, because there were no public transport links. Equally, I'm alarmed at the proposal by Cardiff Council to agree to building 2,500 homes in the north of Cardiff, north of my constituency, without, at the moment, any of the transport links that would be needed to ensure that people were able to get to work and to leisure either by active travel or by sustainable public transport. And the alternative is that they will do exactly what is happening on the Redrow site, which is close nearby, which is that people are getting into their cars and clogging up the roads with air pollution and making life hell for people who don't have a car, have no options, live where they live because they don't have choices, and certainly impacting on the health of our children. So, we have to ensure that local authorities are taking decisions aligned with the climate obligations that they too have made to ensure that we don't have a world that our future generations won't want to live in.

I just want to take issue with point 2 of the Tory motion, which is the idea that these experts should have been doing a public engagement exercise. No. That is the job of Welsh Government and the Welsh Parliament. That is the job of the Welsh Government and the Welsh Parliament, not transport experts. Obviously, we need to continue to consult people, but simply getting consultations to do everything infantilises Governments and makes them incapable of making the right decisions. So, we definitely need to change, and I think there's an absolute treasure trove in this roads review report, which, disappointingly, Natasha Asghar doesn't seem to have read. It's got some fantastic recommendations in it and I look forward to another debate where we will have a different focus other than the one of, 'Do nothing. Let's just go on as we did before'.