Thank you very much. We are in a very difficult situation here, and I think it’s absolutely right that we do debate this issue, so I thank Plaid for that. This is going to be a much more fruitful debate than the one we’ve just concluded.

The Welsh Government has put over £150 million of subsidy into the bus industry since the pandemic, and there’s absolutely no doubt that the numbers of people who used to use the bus services still haven’t come back to the buses. Even in Cardiff, where there has been a better than average return, it’s still only 75 per cent to 80 per cent of the people using the buses who used them pre pandemic. So, some people have completely changed the way they operate in their lives, either because they’re too scared to come out for a variety of reasons, or because they’ve either bought a bike—unlikely; we’d like to hope so—or they’ve got a private car. Of course, this is absolutely the wrong direction to the one we want people to go in, particularly as many people try and operate a private car when they actually don’t have the money to do it; they are living in transport poverty.

I absolutely congratulate the Deputy Minister for the heroic things he’s been trying to do to keep the bus services going, because we are facing a real cliff edge of crisis on this one. But we’ve heard yesterday that there’s only £1 million in capital in the budget from the UK Government for everything, for all the services and things that we have to fund. So, there is no more money at the moment, and how we're going to manage to get through this and still have the bus services that we need to make the transition away from the private motor car—it's really, really difficult to see how we're going to do that.

We are absolutely between a rock and a hard place, because most of the buses that are being used are using petrol and diesel, ergo the price of these fuels has gone up exponentially. Very few local authorities have actually managed to get the grants to electrify their buses. I know that Cardiff and Newport have been able to be successful in doing so. Other local authorities either haven't applied or have been turned down, and I can't say which that is, but, clearly, that's a very good question.

We have no central direction of where our buses go. Private companies will cherry-pick the routes that they want to go on in order to maximise the amount of money that they can make out of x or y. That means that they are undermining the viability of public sector bus services, which were in a position to cross-subsidise, if you like, the better used services with those that were socially important but not very well used.

We've had years and years of under-investment in rail, which makes it seriously difficult for us to develop the sort of amazing integrated public transport system that London has. But that is because we have a system of Government that's completely unfair. London and the south-east have had way more money invested in public transport than we have had in Wales. At the moment, we have a Government that is providing us with a fiction that, somehow, HS2, which runs between Old Oak Common and Birmingham, is benefiting Wales. I invite you to look at the geography.

So, until we get a change of Government with a little bit more sanity in the arrangements around fair funding, we have the following situation: we have a private company who operate the C8 from St Mary's Street in the centre of Cardiff, and they've suddenly announced that it's not going to run after 4 April. This is important to you guys, because people who provide the services to us in the Senedd, some of them have to start at 7 o'clock in the morning. After that bus is withdrawn, they have no way of getting here by 7 o'clock in the morning, because there is no other bus service. Unless they're suddenly, after 40 years, going to acquire a bike, they are simply not going to be able to. Their rotas are going to have to change to accommodate whatever still exists of bus services. 

Equally, the other huge, massive issue in my constituency is the cost of school transport. Children are not attending school because even those on free school meals are having to pay £400 for the privilege of going to school if they live too far away to realistically walk, and we simply don't yet have the alternatives of active travel, because most secondary school students should be able to travel by bike. So, we have a really difficult situation, and I don't know how we're going to resolve this one and I'm interested to know who has got the solutions.