, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
Yes, so—. Chair, is there time for Roger to explain how we're doing that?
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
A couple of complicated things there, Jenny. The Bill places additional reporting requirements on the Welsh Ministers, so we are putting ourselves under a duty to report on targets and whether they're met and what the process is. We are under a duty, under…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
Yes. There are socioeconomic, environmental and health benefits associated with this, and they all have—. Well, it's a balance, isn't it, between what you're trying to do, and that's absolutely the space we're talking about, Janet, in terms of achievable. So…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
Yes, of course. The Welsh Government has a statutory plan for consultation, and also we will—. We couldn't set the regulations without the consultation, because we need to consult with various technical bodies and health organisations, and so on, in order to…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
So, we've been having a bit of a long conversation about this, haven't we? So, what we currently do is we report on, as Roger's just said—reports for Wales and the rest of the UK are published online and the UK Government publish them as well. We've got a…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
So, that's the same conversation, Janet, really. It's about where we are with existing targets: whether they are in fact the interim targets you guys are talking about. We'll provide a piece of information to the committee—
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
If you have an open fire or a log burner, or whatever it is that you use to supplement your heating—and goodness knows with the price of energy, a lot of people are doing that—then you need to understand what the different behaviours in doing that actually do…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
Well, right across the whole of Wales.
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
So, in previous committees when we've had this discussion, it's been obvious to me that even members of the committee weren't aware, for example, that burning wet wood puts particulate matter into the atmosphere, whereas kiln-dried or very dry wood doesn't…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
Can I also say though on that, Huw, that there's a very big education piece on that?
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
We’ll be doing that at the same time as collecting the data, so there’s a whole shed load of work to do—technical term—to go alongside this for how do you reduce the air pollutants in accordance with the targets. So, I’m sure we’ll come on to the road traffic…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
Yes. I’d really love to get all these set before the end of this Senedd term. I’ve said this in a couple of the committees already. Whether we can or not—you know, we need to get the data in place. One of the things we have to do is—. So, if we’re not meeting…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
It's three years, isn't it, for the—?
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
So, one of the things we’ve been looking at is how we will roll out the data collection, isn’t it? And exactly where that might be and how the data stream will then come back in to us, and the analysis and so on. So, I think—. And Olwen, you come in, but I…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
Absolutely, Jenny. So, I make the offer that we will write to the committee, setting out where the monitoring stations are, what we currently know—make it obvious what we don’t know, which is what the Bill is about—and then what we could currently do, and why…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
So, I think—. I wonder, Chair, whether it would be useful—that’s what I was whispering to Olwen about—if we provide the committee with a set of information about what the current duties look like and how we currently do that, so you can see what the sort of…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
So, again, I'll ask—I don't know which one of you it is. But we already have existing targets, so we're not starting from zero. The issue is: do we need more interim targets than the existing ones? Will we divert work from the actual targets into trying to…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
It's stretching, but achievable. Ambitious, but achievable. Because we know, from lots of other examples in politics, that setting a target that can't be achievable just ends up with nothing happening at all. So, there's no point in us setting an air quality…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
So, what we want to be able to do is have the correct amount of data in place that allows us to understand what we're really looking at. I know that ammonia is very harmful; what I don't know is whether the level of ammonia right here is the same as it is in…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
And then just to finish the piece—sorry, I know I'm going on too long for this—that the regulations that then set the targets are set correctly, with the right procedure, so that we have the right evidence base for those. And then the last thing I would…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
—that's very harmful—I just made it up—that nobody has ever heard of before, and we didn't know about it, and now we know it exists because a clever scientist has found it, we don't want to not be able to deal with that because the Bill is narrowed in. So, we…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
I don't have any problem with any of that, Jenny, other than we're looking for the Bill to set up a practical set of things for us to do it. So, if the committee wants to recommend that the Government should put itself under a duty to consider targets for a…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
So, they're not being. The point of this Bill is that we know that we have data gaps all over Wales—that's absolutely the point. So, we might have some data on ammonia, but it won't be sufficient and it won't be nuanced, and so on. And we know that, for…
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
I'm going to have to ask one of the officials to come in on that. Roger, is that you?
, Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
The Environment (Air Quality and Soundscapes) (Wales) Bill - evidence from the Minister for Climate Change: part 1
So, our advice—and I'm more than happy to have an exchange with the committee on this, and probably will need to do it in writing after the evidence session too—but my advice is that we need to be—. I'm very happy to look at it, I'm very happy to consider…
