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Transport (Wales) Bill

No. The hon. Gentleman should read the new clause. It seeks to ensure that any dispute would be referred to the Secretary of State for Transport. I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. He is right. How can we be certain that the Minister’s promises in Committee or in the House today will be as helpful as we all want to believe they will be? We still have no explicit assurances in the Bill that English local authorities will have useful recourse to a Secretary of State in Westminster in the event of problems in the creation of local transport plans or in the implementation of policies on transport crossing the border. We are still unsure what form discussions between English and Welsh authorities will take, particularly the Welsh joint transport authorities. We have no guarantees that people in England who use Welsh transport will be able to make effective representations to the public transport users committee for Wales. I still have deep concerns that people who live in authorities just outside Wales will have to suffer a long and drawn-out route of representation to the Assembly, if they are represented at all. It is bad enough that English local authorities must make representations to a Secretary of State who then makes representations to the Assembly, but it is unforgivable that there is no certainty of that occurring effectively. Given the obvious trend in the opinions of the leadership of the Assembly, I wonder whether we should have taken a far less trusting approach to the Bill. I tabled the new clause to ensure successful cross-border and Westminster-Cardiff relations as regards transport in Wales.