Dr. Lynn Sloman:

On car sharing, the big opportunities are around work with large employment sites encouraging their employees to car share. That can work very well in the context of parking management and restraints. One of the recommendations of the recent commission, in which I was involved on behalf of the Welsh Government, looking at alternatives to building another section of the M4 motorway was the introduction of a workplace parking levy for large employers with car parking facilities and to provide supports for car sharing so that there would be the carrot and the stick and for that regular journey car sharing would come to be seen as attractive and sensible. There are initiatives such as parking cash-out under which people get paid for the days when they do not drive their cars to work, which has worked very effectively in North America and has been used to a limited degree in the United Kingdom by companies such as the pharmaceutical company, Pfizer.

On the question on road-user charging and whether it should be done before or after improving the alternatives, the answer is both. One has to deliver upfront improvements and people have to feel that there are decent alternatives. I was involved in Transport for London at the time road-user charging in the form of the congestion charge was introduced in central London. It followed a period of about two years in which the the then mayor, Ken Livingstone, had put very high priority on improving bus services, including the introduction of a £1 flat fare for bus services and improvement of the quality of the bus network. That meant that people understood that they had alternatives and they were getting better. The narrative that the congestion charge or eco levy, which might be more of a pay-per-mile scheme, provides the revenue that enables us to carry on improving public transport and creates the political and public narrative in support of it. It is about upfront investment in improving the alternatives, but also accepting that if we waited for the perfect public transport system and cycle infrastructure, we would never do road-user charging. We have to do enough to ensure people have an alternative and to then continue to improve those alternatives.

I do not have a great deal to say on appraisal, except that I very much agree with Deputy Bruton that the current appraisal methodologies are not fit for purpose. There are severe problems with the way in which, over many years, a super-structure has been built up on rather faulty and flaky foundations related to many thousands of drivers saving small amounts of time. That does not work and it does not serve us very well in appraising public transport and active travel schemes as well as, as mentioned by the Deputy, broadband.