Lee Waters MS

As a background note to my keynote address to AITPM National Transport Conference and Speaker Tour in August 2024 I have set out some of the key themes for the reforms that have been carried out in Wales that I had a role in developing as a Minister in the Welsh Government Transport Department, 2019 - 2024. I hope to add to this as I reflect on the conversations I have on my visits to meet policy makers and professional in Perth, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Melbourne. I'd really value any comments or challenge you have to any of the chapters. My thoughts are structured around the following themes (click to open each): 1 INTRODUCTION - Lessons from Wales 2 START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON 3 SAYING ALL THE RIGHT THINGS 4 …DOING THE RIGHT THINGS 5 DON'T FORGET THE HIDDEN WIRING 6 REWIRE

'Australians are on the frontline of climate change impacts. We are experiencing more severe bushfires, hotter and longer heatwaves, rising sea levels that are exacerbating hazards along our coastlines, cyclones that are projected to intensify and possibly track further southwards and an increase in rainfall intensity and associated flooding as the climate warms.’                                                                 Insurance Council of Australia (ICA, 2023a) Hunting is impacted. I’m hearing my mob saying they got to chuck an extra half a tank of petrol in and drive another two hours to get kangaroo. Five years ago that wasn’t the case’                            ...

People will do what is easiest. It is human nature. For 70 years we’ve focused on making the car the easiest and most convenient way to get around. So that’s what people do. To meet our legal carbon duties we need to reduce car use and achieve a shift in transport modes. If we want people to use alternatives, we need to make their use convenient and frictionless too. We need to make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do. Wales has made three structural changes alter the underlying dynamics to make sustainable choices easier for people to make. 1. Integrated transport planning 2. Legislated for Highway Authorities to plan for Active travel provision 3. Lower speed limits where people and traffic mix Delivery context Responsibility for transport policy has been devolved to Wales since 1999, but Britain’s unwritten constitution is far from neat, and Welsh devolution has been characterised by ‘jagged edges’ along the interface between central and devolved Governments. R...

The Wales Transport Strategy published in 2021 put modal shift at the heart of our policies. For the first time, we’ve set a target on increasing the number of trips made by sustainable modes of transport from 32% to 45% by 2040. Grand declarations are important to signal system change. However, as we've seen in the past, transport strategies often say all the right things in the narrative but the delivery mechanisms are programmed to deliver business-as-usual. In spite of the new targets the bible for highway engineers, the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges , still prioritises traffic flow; the bible for economists and finance officials, the UK Treasury Green Book, still insists on monetising notional journey time savings when it comes to transport investments; rather than reduce speeds to save lives, orthodoxy suggests we upgrade highway design to increase capacity and allow faster speeds under the guise of road safety.  Unless the system wiring is reconfigured to delive...

Everyone agrees that 2050 is a deadline we can’t afford to miss to get our carbon emissions to balance in order to achieve NetZero. So how do we work back from there? In March 2021 Senedd Cymru, the Welsh Parliament, put net zero targets into law, and set interim targets for 2030 and 2040. Getting on to the trajectory for 2050 means that the rate of emissions cuts needed must increase sharply in each target period. Our NetZero Wales plan breaks down our overall target into a series of 5-year carbon budgets . The first carbon budget ran from 2016 to 2020 and was easily met because of the changes in the energy sector which saw the use of coal for energy coming to an end. But you can only close a coal-burning power station once. The second budget from 2021 to 2025 is more challenging and requires a 37% average reduction. Practically all transport emissions (99%) are emissions of carbon dioxide, and the transport sector is the third largest greenhouse gas emitter after electricity and he...

Although the M4 decision was not to be applied across all road schemes it set a clear direction of travel that was followed through in a new 20-year transport strategy which set a ‘new path ’. This ‘llwybr newydd’ (to use the Welsh translation) put “people and climate change at the front and centre of our transport system’. Significantly, the strategy challenged the prevailing view that emissions reductions in transport should be left entirely to the decarbonisation of vehicles. For the first time ever in a transport strategy in the UK, there is an explicit commitment to demand reduction and modal shift. Llwybr newydd commits to a target of 45% of journeys to be made by public transport, walking and cycling by 2040, up from 32% (a 13% increase). And a commitment in the Welsh Government's Net Zero plan to a  10% reduction in car use  by 2030.  To bring about change you need to set out a vision for change.  The transport strategy, Llwybyr Newydd , set-out three ...

Lee Waters and Mark Drakeford In December 2018 Welsh Labour elected Mark Drakeford as its new Leader and First Minister. His platform included a commitment to develop a new Transport Strategy which would “give meaning to our commitments under the Environment Act to cut carbon emissions by 80%, and under the Future Generations Act to plan for the long-term”. He appointed me, a critic of Welsh economic and transport policy , as a Deputy Minister in the economy and transport department work alongside the existing and more orthodox Minister Ken Skates. I was tasked with responsibility for reforming the approach to active travel, and to taking forward a commitment ‘to encourage a presumption of 20mph speed limits in residential areas’. An early test of intent for the Government was a long-awaited decision on whether to go ahead with a new section of motorway to divert a congestion bottleneck on the M4 between Cardiff and Newport in the south east of Wales. The fourteen mile, six ...

Wales has already shown that change, and in particular behaviour change, is possible; and the experience of achieving it in one area can provide lessons for change in other areas. In 2004 Wales recycled just 17% of our waste. 20 years later we are 2nd in the global league table for recycling rates. Wales now recycles 58.6% of our waste*, just a whisker behind Austria (on 59%) in the global league table (Australia is ranked 18th on 38%). At a household level families now routinely collect all their food waste for weekly collection, alongside all plastic, cardboard, paper and glass - which in most local authorities are required to be sorted separately into collection bags on the curbside. And weekly waste collections, what we refer to as ‘black bags’, have been replaced by either fortnightly or three weekly collections with a limit to the number of bags a house can put out (and some local authorities are now considering moving to monthly collections of recyclable waste). A significant ch...