While the City Council lacks many of the powers necessary to transform our city’s economy - it should be possible to work with the Senedd and other partners to make life in our city better and more sustainable. Plaid Cymru Newport’s manifesto is additional to Plaid Cymru - The Party of Wales’s local government manifesto which can be found in full on-line here.
Our City needs to focus on developing affordable housing, to focus on redeveloping our local economy, and to focus on the local rather than regional. Our city needs to build in resilience to flooding with flood avoidance being the focus rather than flood prevention, and to focus on growing green jobs and actively pushing to develop our transport infrastructure with railway stations at Caerleon, Tredegar Park, Somerton, Llanwern, and Magor.
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
We need to tackle the housing crisis in the City - there is an acute lack of affordable homes - something made worse by rapidly rising house prices - as Newport sits between Cardiff and Bristol and is perceived rightly as a cheaper place to live - this means that people in Newport cannot afford to by or rent their own homes.
While is is not some thing that the City Council can solve individually as former council housing is now run by Housing Associations - the City Council should work with the Housing Associations and the Welsh Government to priorities at the creation of affordable homes within Newport.
REDEVELOPING OUR LOCAL ECONOMY
We need to develop and encourage local supply chains and forces on the creation of local business, as this is create more local flexible job opportunities, within the City centre. Local businesses trade with each other, sell goods and services and help to ensure that money spent within them stays on the local economy longer.
The Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England long ago proved that ten pounds sent in a local business circulates three times longer locally than it does if spent in a chain- this principle applies equally to small towns or larger urban areas.
The City Council should work to expand businesses support for existing and developing small businesses. While the loss of Debenhams in Friars Walk was a bitter blow - which while covid did not help - in reality the Debenham’s retail model had been failing for some years.
The Friar’s walk development itself was too small, too limited in scope and failed to create the retail space for local businesses to set up from the start. While there have been some tentative steps towards that recently ( the redeveloped Market being a good example of what’s possible), at a fundamental level a refocus on growing and supporting small businesses - there is room enough to make this work.
Newport has suffered because of the unhealthy obsession with directly competing with Cardiff and Cribs Causeway. We seriously need to focus on growing small local businesses that supply our needs as well as hosting the usual suspects to bring economic life back to our city centre. If we can do this then we can bring sustainable economic growth and some life back to our city centre.
SAYING NO TO THE CARDIFF CITY REGION AND THE WESTERN GATEWAY
There are few if any positives for Newport being a simple dormitory town for Bristol or Cardiff. Plaid in Newport can never subscribe to the Severnside agenda, no matter how many times it gets rebranded and relaunched. The proposed Cardiff City region and the Western Gateway project will not serve Newport well and need to be abandoned - to be replaced with a redevelopment plan that focuses on a local rather than the regional scale.
FLOOD AVOIDANCE
We need to build into our city the resilience to cope with flooding - sadly in a warmer wetter world - flood events are going to become more common - we need to think and act smarter, with shifting the focus from flood prevention to flood avoidance. Local water storage and management is increasingly part of intelligent urban design, something that is becoming more common and necessary in a warmer wetter world, as we will have to re-engineer our infrastructures to deal with more frequent extreme weather events.
The concept of the sponge city or urban sponge. something that should be embedded and central to urban planning should now be coming into its own, particularly in Wales, with our urban areas being redesigned or designed from the start to soak up, and store deluges of torrential rain to prevent damaging and dangerous flash flooding but without the construction of large scale flood defences.
GROWING GREEN JOBS
Newport is perfectly placed to be at the forefront of the green energy revolution with its deep water port, our highly skilled adaptable workforce, our city should be a natural centre for the development go off shore wind energy, tidal lagoons in the Severn estuary, and underwater tidal turbines.
The original Newport river barrage was rejected by the Conservatives in 1991, the City Council, working with the Senedd should commission a modern feasibility study into tapping the tidal energy potential of the Usk, in Newport, with an Usk River Barrage, nothing that if approved could transform our city relationship with our river along with our economy.
BUILDING OUR RAILWAYS
Plaid like many people in Newport, welcomed the commitment to build new railway stations at Tredegar Park, Somerton, Llanwern, and Magor. We need ground broken sooner rather than later to bring the new railway stations into being, to provide alternative means of getting around our city and elsewhere, once a degree of normality returns after covid. The new stations are an absolute necessity, but we need a railway station to serve Caerleon / Ponthir which would a real asset to both communities.
