Heritage Interpretation and Access

Speech by Peter Black delivered to Plenary on Tue 10th Jun 2008

Peter Black: I propose the following amendments in the name of Kirsty Williams. Amendment 3: add as a new point at the end of the motion:

calls on the Welsh Assembly Government to ensure that all improvements to accessibility must be accompanied by adequate provision of public transport to ensure the Welsh historic environment is available to all.

Amendment 4: add as a new point at the end of the motion:

notes with regret that Welsh pensioners and disabled people will be significantly disadvantaged in enjoying Welsh heritage at the best time to do so due to the withdrawal of their free passes on the Heart of Wales line throughout the summer period.

Amendment 5: add as a new point at the end of the motion:

would welcome plans to allow Welsh children free entry to the heritage sites in Cadw care once all other WAG spending commitments for Welsh children have been met.

I will start by agreeing with the Minister that it is vital that access, both physical and intellectual, to the Welsh historic environment is achieved, and I am pleased that he and the Government are taking this seriously. Improving accessibility is a huge and important task, and we hope that this will be properly funded. I emphasise that as we have seen plenty of evidence in recent months of the Welsh Assembly Government making some laudable commitments and getting hopes up, but failing to properly fund them. I hope that the Minister has ensured that the budget is in place to deliver exactly what he is promising to children and pensioners around Wales, because, otherwise, once again, they will find themselves disappointed by the Government's failures to deliver on what it has offered.

A particularly important issue in improving access to Wales's historic environment is public transport to and from such places. It is all well and good to say that the physical and intellectual access to places has been improved to make these places attractive and accessible for all, but you could argue that it is money wasted if no-one can get there. My party believes that local authorities need to take cultural factors into account when planning local transport, housing and education schemes. These types of improvements to Wales's historic environment cannot be looked at in isolation, and they need to run in tandem with local plans. For example, many of Wales's train stations are not accessible to disabled people. Are there additional bus routes in rural areas that travel regularly to and from these sites? I do not believe that there are. It is all very well for the Minister to say that we have a transport strategy that has been recently published, but I do not recall a particular chapter in the transport strategy on how we should access historic sites and how the Welsh Assembly Government would invest in that. So, the planning is partly down to local authorities, but it is also down to the Welsh Assembly Government and Cadw. When we start to open these sites more to make them more accessible for disabled people and to make them more accessible in terms of the cost of accessing them, in other words, offering them free to children and pensioners, we must also ensure that, as part of those plans, there is a transport plan to ensure that people can get to the sites and use those concessions. If we do not have that, the whole exercise becomes fairly meaningless.

We welcome the free access that is mooted in the motion. When the Welsh Liberal Democrats were in Government, we introduced free access to museums and we are only too happy to endorse the extension to those plans to allow Welsh pensioners and Welsh children free entry to heritage sites under the care of Cadw from 1 September of this year. However, as our amendment states, we would welcome this proposal once all other Welsh Assembly Government spending commitments for Welsh children have been met. We heard on the news today that the Minister has changed course on the foundation phase. We know that funding for that particular scheme is not in place to deliver what the Welsh Assembly Government wants to deliver, that we do not have all of the funding in place to deliver the improvements needed to schools around Wales, and that we still lack funds for further education and higher education.

Therefore, it is a question of priorities. This is one priority among many. The Assembly Government is putting forward a whole raft of priorities in terms of how it will use its limited budget. We often hear from the opposite side of the Chamber how limited the settlement was and how difficult it is to make ends meet because of the Barnett formula and the fact that the UK Government was not particularly generous this year, but money is still being found for other schemes when the core services that we need for education are not being properly funded. The Minister says that amendment 5 is irrelevant, but if the Minister thinks that funding the foundation phase and funding schools properly is irrelevant, there is something wrong with the Government's priorities.

On prioritising, the Minister spoke against our amendment on the Heart of Wales line because he said that people did not want to have free passes in the summer as the trains fill up at Swansea and local people are not able to use them. That underlines the Assembly Government's attitude towards transport. If you want people to use the Heart of Wales line, you should invest in the rolling stock and ensure that we can make use of the free passes, but do not do away with the free passes, because people rely on them all around the mid Wales area.