:...Secondly, in the river
clean-up that we had down by the estuary in Ogmore Vale, 2,000
tyres were pulled out. Alun, who had been organising it, is
planning on having a week next June to pull out a further 10,000.
I know, Minister, he would probably love it if you could come,
and I would like him to be able to reach out and invite you, if
that is okay. We’re writing to all supermarkets
to ask them also to make sure that those trolleys do not end up
in our waterways, and we’re trying to get everybody to sign that
too. I just wanted to pass that on. Thank you, Minister...
(Minister for Climate
Change): Thank you very much, Sarah. I’d be delighted to come. If
you want to write and formally ask me, I’d be very happy to do
so. We’ve had a brief discussion about this already. I should
declare an interest, of course, because I’m also a member of the
Bluetits in my local area. I particularly like cold water sea
swimming, so I’m very happy to come and, indeed, have a little
dip while I’m at it. That would be very nice indeed.
I know you know that the sampling was taken the day after you did
the big river clean-up, and therefore we’ve got some results that
we think are probably skewed in terms of what the outcome is, but
we are making sure that NRW take a range of testing there to make
sure that we get a true result. We’ve had other disappointing
results, though: both of the new bathing waters, the one in
Ogmore-by-Sea and also the one at Watch House bay, we’ve had poor
results for. So we’ve got additional monitoring in place there to
make sure that we understand why that’s happened and to make sure
that we can correct that, because we want to designate them as
bathing waters and we therefore want them to have the excellent
quality the rest of them have. The amount of tyres that came out
of the river was quite astonishing, wasn't it? And I know that
you know there are many more to come, so I'd be very delighted to
come, and I'm more than happy to broker a meeting between you,
NRW and Dŵr Cymru to see what we can do to monitor that better.
