Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:04 pm on 12 September 2023.
I do struggle to understand whether or not the Conservatives simply don’t understand the nuance of this policy, or they do understand it and choose to deliberately misrepresent it for cynical political ends. I oscillate between those two, if I’m honest. But what we do know is they’re wrong, and the evidence speaks for itself. Huw Irranca-Davies is absolutely right, and again his leadership role as chair of the cross-party group on active travel has been important in adding support and joining this with other agendas too. It will be appropriate for us to monitor how this works in practice; it is a very, very, significant change, and it would be naive of us to assume that it’s going to be flawless. We currently feel—and the pilots have demonstrated our confidence in this judgment—that the changes can be made at a local level. We feel there is sufficient discretion in the current exemptions criteria to allow that to happen. There is nervousness amongst some local authorities, and legal advice that makes them nervous about how far they're willing to stray from the exact letter of the guidance, even though we have built in discretion there. And as I say, in Flintshire, Buckley—