Here's the latest Politics File by Argus politics reporter Ian Craig:

SO THERE you have it.

After six years, £44 million on a year-long public inquiry, hours upon hours upon hours of debate, and more column inches in the Argus than I’d care to count, the M4 relief road is dead.

The writing was on the wall as soon as Mark Drakeford was elected as first minister - while Carwyn Jones, who took a far more Blair-esque attitude to business, was generally enthusiastic about the scheme, Mr Drakeford had long been known to be, at best, sceptical towards it.

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Whether or not this was the right decision is a question we’re not going to solve here - as disastrous as it would have been to see large swathes of the Gwent Levels concreted over, when you’re doing 20mph through the Brynglas Tunnels at rush hour it’s hard not to wonder if it would be worth it.

So the question now is what’s being done instead.

Obviously Mark Drakeford wasn’t going to stand up in the Assembly yesterday and just say the relief road was dead and that was that - so we waited keenly to see what plan B was.

Would the blue route - the one which involves beefing up the SDR and Steelworks Road - be given the go-ahead instead?

Or would we get one of the countless other versions of the scheme presented in the public inquiry?

Was a load more cash being ploughed into the South Wales Metro to get people to leave their cars at home? Had the Welsh Government invented Back to the Future-style flying cars to allow us to glide gracefully over the Brynglas Tunnels?

Was a massive catapult going to be built in Magor?

No, we’re getting - wait for it - a new commission to look at alternatives to the relief road.

Great.

It’s almost Monty Python-esque - and a very uniquely-Labour move - that we had a public inquiry that lasted more than a year and cost millions of pounds, and once it presented its findings the Welsh Government decided to ignore what it said and form a new commission to look at the issue again.

Presumably a few years down the line we’ll have a new agency to look at the commission’s findings, followed by a review board and then - just to break the mould - a cross-party committee, which will throw the whole thing in the bin and start again.

Meanwhile, people living in Brynglas, Crindau and Christchurch will continue to be choked by the fumes from the cars at standstill in the tunnels while the drivers on the road are all late for work.

It’s entirely possible the black route really wasn’t the way forward - come back to me after I’ve waded through the 561-page inquiry report on that one - but that doesn’t mean we don’t need action.

And sitting around and talking about fancy new ways to solve the problem just isn’t good enough. We need something done - whether this is a different form of relief road, more bus routes or even this Metro we’ve been promised for years - and it needs to happen now.

The idea of a relief road was first suggested in 1991 - when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, Bryan Adams was number one in the charts with that song from the Robin Hood film and yours truly was in primary school.

They could see there was a problem then - so why are we still here 28 years later apparently further away from an answer than we were then?

In fairness, the Welsh Government has promised a few new immediate measures which they say will start to make a difference within a few weeks.

If that happens, great, but forgive me if I say I’ll believe it when I see it.