Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:24 pm on 22 March 2023.
I don’t know where to start sometimes. Janet, you’re absolutely right that we’ve had 25 years of devolution, but we’ve had nearly 30 or 40 years of deregulated bus services that have failed. They’ve failed the country. This Government is going to change the law in the next couple of years, and I expect you to vote for it, quite honestly, and I hope that all your colleagues will vote for it.
Presiding Officer, I’ll bring my remarks to a close now. What I hope the Minister will be able to do—perhaps not this afternoon, but I hope this debate will contribute to his thinking—is to articulate his new vision for bus services. Because when the manifesto was written, when we've had these debates in the past, they were all about bus services that had been unaffected by COVID. COVID has clearly changed the context in which we're now operating, and I hope that the Government will bring to this place a statement on their vision for the future so that we will be able to understand where they see bus services developing. The extension to the current bus funding is a good thing, but I want, for example, to see a role for the smaller operators. I don't want to see all our bus services bought up and chewed out by profiteering larger organisations that really don't care about the people they serve. I want to see that role. I want to see services delivering for the smaller communities, the isolated communities—and they're not all in rural communities, they're in the heart of our cities and our towns. That means that we have to have an all-encompassing vision, and then the delivery for it, where the budget will be and what the legislative framework will be within which these services will be delivered. And then I expect the Conservatives to take our interventions, to listen to what we're saying and to vote for the policy.