, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
And just a very brief fact-check to put this in proportion, over the last five years, NRW has purchased 214 hectares of land, and most of that is for compensatory planting. So, it's not a large amount.
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
—land for commercial forestry. We are committed—as I thought there was cross-party support for—to plant a national forest for Wales. That involves land acquisition, of course it does, both for productive use and for leisure use, and for biodiversity use, all…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
Okay. I'd like to see the evidence that we're outbidding young farmers in those communities. I've not seen that, and, in fact, Tilhill have made clear that in the transactions they've been involved in, the land they've bought on behalf of investors has been…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
So, I profoundly disagree, and this is an argument used by people who don't want to change as the latest reason why they shouldn't have to change. It's a false choice to say we have to choose between food security and protecting biodiversity and tackling the…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
Well, obviously, local highway maintenance is the responsibility of local highway authorities. So, local government has a responsibility for local roads, and that is expected to be funded from the revenue support grant as anything else is, and we have given a…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
I think there's a very clear reason for it: the bus system in London was not privatised in the 1980s; everywhere outside of London it was. And if you look at passenger levels between London and the rest of the UK, there's a very clear relationship that can be…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
So, I think we've got a problem here. Rail is an important part of the mix. I think there's a danger we focus too much on rail, because—this is back to the gender point—decision makers like rail, men of a certain age like playing with train sets, and there is…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
Well, I think there's a really rich area for challenge here. I think you've hit on a real area that we need to do more work on. So, I think there are two elements to this, to me. The first is the behavioural change. So, the founder of Sustrans, John Grimshaw…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
I do my best.
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
You're right to point out the challenges. They exist, for sure. I think it's significant and encouraging that TfW themselves have just reorganised their management structure along a multimodal approach. I think that is the right thing to do. I think the join…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 2
We are developing it iteratively and it's being developed quite rapidly. It's a massive infrastructure project, it's circa £1 billion, and we're now seeing the physical infrastructure starting to take place on street level and we'll see a lot more of it in…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
There won't be one Bill that covers both, no.
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
I think that's too big to do in one Bill.
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
Well, we used to have it, but we dismantled it. Again, this was a deliberate act of the Transport Act 1985 to get rid of the old plan system and bring in a privatised one. So, we need to recreate it. At the moment, there is resource inefficiently used: you…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
Well, I'm not sure that I accept the premise, really, because we've created a system where we've embedded car dependency. We've put the car at the centre of our planning system and our transport system, so, now, lots of people in those communities feel that…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
This isn't a tablet handed down by Moses from the mount about the economics of this. This deliberate political decision was taken in 1985 to privatise the bus industry. That has led us to the situation we have now where we've had a dramatic fall in bus…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
So, unless we change the reality and make it easy for people to make the choices that contribute to our climate targets, as well as our health targets, as well as our clean air targets, as well as our town centre regeneration targets, then it's not going to…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
I think we're on the nursery slopes of it all, but we're putting in place the conditions to get there. What Julie and I have said throughout is, across the climate change portfolio, we need to make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do. If you make it…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
Well, with respect, you're seeing it. You've already seen it. We cancelled the M4. We've set up a roads review that has already seen two road schemes cancelled—the Llanbedr bypass and the A55 junctions. We are expecting the full report imminently and we'll…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
Well, it's like the line 'How do you eat an elephant?' isn't it? In pieces. We have plans for all of those things, and let's remember what our carbon budgets tell us. We need to cut emissions as much in the next 10 years as we have done over the course of the…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
I'll answer this, if I may. This is the big challenge, and one of the reasons for creating the portfolio—to put transport alongside the other main emissions drivers. Transport accounts for something like 17 per cent of our carbon emissions, and has been the…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
I think, in a nutshell, our approach is that we're innovating and experimenting on the social housing sector, and we are at the vanguard in this. I think the Welsh Government deserve some credit for the work we've been doing on this. Once the evidence is in…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Scrutiny of the Minister and Deputy Minister for Climate Change - session 1
Just very briefly, in terms of the Scottish model, we are also looking at the home advice service that the Scottish model has, which was one of the recommendations of the deep dive we did on renewables. So, we're currently looking at that now.
, Plenary
Short Debate: Biodiversity: The big picture. Seeding the future—the importance of managing grass verges and grasslands
Thank you very much. That was a short and fruitful debate with many thoughtful contributions. Thank you, Carolyn, for tabling it and for the work you've been doing with us to help inform an approach on this to work with local authorities to try and spread…
, Plenary
Questions to the Minister for Climate Change
Thank you for the question, and I'm aware of the concerns that he's raised previously on behalf of residents in relation to the facility at the Glasdir estate in Ruthin. It was my understanding that NRW did carry out an investigation alongside Denbighshire…
