Transport (Wales) Bill

My Lords, yes, I can confirm that and am most grateful to my noble friend for making that point. My noble friend Lord Anderson also asked about the cross-border considerations of the strategy development. The Bill contains a statutory requirement on the Assembly to consult with local authorities in England that border Wales, as well as with Welsh authorities, on the Welsh transport strategy. Nothing in the Bill as drafted will give the Assembly any powers over English services, but it would be required to consider cross-border issues in the development and implementation of its transport policies. My noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno said that there is no mention of rail in the Bill, so how could it possibly be an integrated system? He is sitting there nodding, so I will now try to tell him. We have already really dealt with this in other speaking notes. Rail is covered in general in the transport duty in Clause 1 and will be included in the Wales Transport Strategy. However, this is obviously an issue that will run for a time and I expect that we will be returning to it in Committee. The noble Lord also asked where the subsidies are coming from if there is no new money and how the Assembly could possibly afford all these costs. I can confirm that the funding will come from the Assembly’s transport budget. The Assembly government has set out its transport priorities in its £8 billion, 15-year transport programme. As I said, any questions that I have not answered will be answered by the very helpful officials before Committee. As I said at the beginning, if there are any issues that the noble Lords would like to discuss with me or the Bill team, we would welcome that. We greatly look forward to returning to many of these interesting points in Committee. On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Grand Committee.