It’s local election time and with the campaign now underway, it’s worth taking stock of Bridgend Council’s performance over the last term – where they’ve got things right, where they need to improve and where things have gone wrong. All-Wales local election coverage is over at State of Wales.
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The Caerau Insulation Scandal
The council has dropped many a bollock in the past, but this is one of the worst for two reasons – the direct involvement of a Cabinet Member and the length of time it’s taken to secure a resolution.
I’m not buying the “we didn’t know what was happening” justifications/excuses from officers and senior politicians. There’s evidence – hard and anecdotal – that they knew about this long before it went public yet they did very little. It’s only because of the dogged determination of local community activists and some councillors that this even got the media exposure it warranted.
Yes, it’s true that the funding mechanism was a complete mess and clouded the picture after the fact. That said, for affected residents to be waiting the best part of ten years for repair work to be confirmed, let alone start, is a complete dereliction of the most basic duties a council and politicians have to their communities.
The only ongoing issues now are the timetable for repairs and the question of compensating affected householders. If this affected a wealthy area where residents could afford top-class solicitors, then I doubt there would be any questions over compensation.
Home-School Transport
This is probably going to be the first big council service-related headache facing the incoming administration.
Bridgend Council reverted to the legal minimum level of service a while ago, but despite studies and reports into possible reforms, nothing has happened. The service also still runs a significant deficit (apparently more than £2million-a-year) and that’s despite the council providing only the bare minimum they can get away with legally.
There’s a lack of clarity over what counts as a safe or unsafe walking/cycling route to school. This means that on most mornings and afternoons many parents have voted with their cars.
Then it becomes a feedback loop – parents complain that the roads aren’t safe enough for their children to walk/cycle to school because of traffic, so they opt to drive their children to school and cause the traffic that they’re concerned about.
There needs to be a carrot and stick approach here, but time’s running out for Bridgend Council to come up with a lasting solution.
District Energy Projects
Proposals for district heat schemes and mass decarbonisation by 2050 are rare bits of ambition on the council’s part.
Unfortunately, it seems as though the schemes have become entangled in bureaucracy, stuck on waiting lists for finance, negatively impacted by global events and rising material costs, or just been shown not to work.
The Sunnyside project has been affected by the wellness village contractor going bust, but it should’ve been done by now. Similarly, the Caerau mine water scheme has been scaled back to such an extent that it barely resembles the original plans and doesn’t seem worth the effort.
Given the recent rise in energy prices, these projects have taken on a greater sense of urgency. However, the projected cost of decarbonising the county’s domestic energy supplies by 2050 was recently estimated at anything up to £250million a year; where’s that money going to come from? If they’re struggling to install a generator and some pipes around Bridgend Rec in a single term, how can we have any confidence that the council can lead retrofitting the entire county in less than 30 years?
Response to Bridgend Ford Closure
The problem here isn’t the response; it’s “what response?” The same goes for the UK and Welsh governments as well, it’s not just the council.
There was some vague “promise” on investment in the town centre and alternative businesses; even claims that some companies were said to have shown interest in the former factory site.
Although the pandemic will have had an impact on the speed of the response and the world has since changed dramatically, to lose a major private-sector employer with seemingly no clear plan or strategy to deal with the fallout or futureproof the site is disgraceful. At worse it’s just plain laziness.
Slow Progress on Regeneration Schemes
Compared to other local authorities Bridgend Council has given the appearance of dragging its feet when it comes to major urban regeneration schemes. We get the masterplans and the vision documents and the consultations but it always seems to take an age to get anything done – sometimes due to external events (such as the Sunnyside development), sometimes not. One of few successes I can think of is the redevelopment of Maesteg Town Hall and that’s run over budget and perhaps taken far longer than people thought it would.
Things have started to pick up in Porthcawl over the last two to three years but very little has been achieved since the last local elections – and regeneration itself as a project goes back to before the 2012 elections.
 A new Bridgend College campus at Cheapside seems to be firmly on the drawing board, but I’d be pleasantly surprised if even half of the proposals in the latest Bridgend town centre masterplan actually happen too given that very little, if anything, came out of the previous town centre masterplan.
BCBC don’t have a bottomless put of money and these projects are often dependent on Welsh and UK (previously EU too) capital grants and match-funding – but it all points to just a lack of agency.
People would probably be more willing to accept projects being cancelled and return to the drawing board than constantly being told, “just wait a bit longer”.
