Bronterre News

CEREDIGION council has dreamt up what it thinks is a very good idea. It has formed a Let’s-Do-Everything-to-Foul-Up-Aberystwyth Committee. Already, this new task-force have had a brainwave.

They’ve worked out how they can likely deal a terminal blow to a good few of the town’s shops, cafés and restaurants, while at the same time enraging residents by ending an age-old right to free and unfettered enjoyment of Aberystwyth promenade. 

The businesses are those struggling to survive in the face of a withering triple assault from the cost of living squeeze, the seemingly unquenchable onlineshopping mania and the craze among office-staffs for working from home in pyjamas and dressing-gown with a dog as foot-warmer. 

  The idea – a particularly bad one – is to make people pay to park on a long stretch of Aberystwyth promenade where waiting has always been free. 

It’s a proposal blinkered and short-sighted, a thought-free plan powered by a ludicrous display of tunnel-vision. The maximisation of parking revenue is being viewed in total isolation – without a thought for the inevitable negative effects on the wider local economy.

Extract every last extra pound from motorists – most of them payers of Ceredigion council tax – and damn the consequences if that results in exasperated drivers deserting the town, and shops, cafés and restaurants – quite likely already teetering on the brink of viability – closing down.

  Never mind the repercussions for people and jobs, for the chances of maintaining for Aberystwyth even a vaguely buoyant, never mind dynamic, air. 

  This obey-us-or-be-fined committee shows not the slightest awareness that demanding money from people who may simply want to pause briefly for a short walk, or to take in the sea view, could well put them off coming to the town at all, resulting in streets even emptier than they often already are, and causing a further slump in shopping activity.

  In short, it’s a plan destined to make lives miserable and the economy turbulent. 

  People have always had the right to walk along the promenade without paying for the privilege, and without clock-watching for fear they’ll fall foul of a traffic-warden. For heaven’s sake, they say, leave us alone, spare us your control-freakery. We demand to be left in peace to wander by the sea, along our promenade, and to perhaps stop for a cup of something and watch the world go by.  

  For Ceredigion council tax-payers especially, this is a right the authority has no moral jurisdiction to end. 

  Officially, the people behind this proposal are on what’s ironically named the thriving communities committee. Allow yourself a chuckle over this misuse of language – Aberystwyth will hardly thrive if it’s variously being commercially destroyed, stripped of a basic right and eyed up by bossy councillors intent on raiding personal bank accounts.    

  Yet we have been here before. Nineteen years ago – and without public consultation, yet alone consent – the council declared the road between the harbour and the wooden jetty, which had always been open highway, would henceforth be a paid-for car-park. The place is now an ugly jungle of poles and notices, warnings and prohibitions.

  Now they’re trying it on again.

Morgan makes equality of NHS access a sick joke

IN A reassertion of the ridiculous, health minister Eluned Morgan persists with her daft insistence that people in Mid Wales are perfectly relaxed about having to trek to the other end of the country to access an early-warning clinic for patients suspected of having cancer. 

  Hywel Dda health board was told by the government 23 months ago to set up so-called rapid diagnosis clinics (RDCs) and, crucially, to guarantee easy access to this innovative service regardless of where patients live. 

  It has failed dismally to deliver on that instruction. Since October 2021, just one such clinic has been set up – at Prince Philip Hospital, Llanelli, a 120-mile round trip from Aberystwyth and much further than that for numerous other towns and villages north and east.

  Yet RDCs are invaluable. At the end of a single day at such a clinic, patients will get results of tests and a likely diagnosis, together with a referral to a specialist, a plan for more tests or reassurance if results are normal.

  Eluned Morgan is thus presiding over a system which ensures nothing even faintly approaching equality of access.

  Ceredigion MS Elin Jones strongly backs this column’s demand for an RDC to be set up at Bronglais Hospital but is being stonewalled by the health board and the minister.

  Morgan tells her: “I understand your concern about access and travel arrangements to the rapid diagnostic centre in Llanelli…An RDC provides an additional referral option for GPs when a patient does not meet the criteria for suspected cancer referral, but the GP still suspects cancer.

  “Evaluation shows them to be very popular with patients and I find it to be the case that patients are prepared to travel for a much better service such as this.”

  This latter point is patent nonsense. To the extent that patients are “prepared to travel” it will be because they have no choice but to spend an arduous day getting to Llanelli from northern Ceredigion, southern Gwynedd or western Powys. Such a journey will be possible only if they have a car, or a friend or relative prepared to ferry them down to South Wales and back. Many patients are too poor to run a car, and public transport may well either be too costly, or impractical because neither bus nor train will get them there and back in a day.

  Is the health minister really so out of touch as to be oblivious to such predicaments?

  At the same time, in referring to the “much better service” offered by an RDC inaccessible to countless numbers of patients, she effectively admits that she thus presides over a classic postcode lottery in which the losers are penalised because they happen to live in rural Mid Wales.

  Morgan must urgently turn her attention to 2015’s Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act, which guarantees collective human rights. Without doubt, failure to ensure the establishment of a rapid diagnosis clinic at Bronglais Hospital flies in the face of this landmark legislation.

Meek and mild councillors bow to CEO diktat

WILL Ceredigion county councillors ever assert themselves? Will they ever find the courage to shake themselves into the realisation that they were elected to lead, not to meekly accede to the preferences of the council’s chief executive?

  Recent evidence is not encouraging. It’s frankly alarming that most councillors deferentially obeyed a command from CEO Eifion Evans to attend a mandatory meeting following protests by members dissatisfied over inadequate lines of communication between them and council officials.

  To hear of councillors describing this enforced meeting as comparable to “being brought in front of the headmaster” is toe-curlingly embarrassing. Have these elected members surrendered all dignity? Why did none of them apparently have enough gumption to point out that it’s not a function of the chief executive to lord it over members, that any such meeting should properly have been called not by an official but by the leader, or chair, of the council? Why this spinelessness?

  It would be futile to try to argue seriously that electronic or phone communication between councillors and officials, and between the public and officials, are just as good as face-to-face contact. They aren’t, and to pretend they are won’t solve the problem. Yet quality of communication is vital for any authentically democratic council.

19 September 2023