Responding to the Welsh Government’s statement ‘Moving North Wales Forward – Our Vision for North Wales and the North East Wales Metro’, Llyr Gruffydd, Plaid Cymru’s North Wales AM, said, “A ‘North Wales Metro’ was unveiled by Labour more than a year ago as an election pledge. Since then nothing has happened and this latest eight-page document is merely a reprise of that plus a few previous improvements to our road network. It regurgitates a four-year-old map of what a metro might look like, but in fact this ‘metro’ only consists of existing bus routes.

“It’s also become the ‘North-east Wales Metro’, suggesting that everywhere beyond Rhyl has been forgotten. Reading the document, I see no timetable or funding arrangements in place to develop this North-East Metro and the Welsh Government should be looking at improving the public transport network system throughout the North so that people can get to work, visit friends and family or socialise more easily.

“It reminds me of the fable about the Emperor’s New Clothes. The emperor in this case keeps asking us to admire his shiny new metro but the reality is that we’re being offered a glorified bus system while the reality on the ground is that bus services in the North-East have been reduced in the past year. The real money in this scheme would be spent on better rail links to and from Manchester and Liverpool.”