UNMEASURABLE SUCCESS ?

Newport’s 19th century Market which has served the city well, through good and bad times and two world wars, is to undergo yet another redevelopment. 

This redevelopment may be the final blow, as most to the remaining stallholders are in the process of moving out and the builders will soon  begin work to transform the market into a multi-million pound, multi-purpose centre.

Some of the market stalls will remain but the redeveloped market will include apartments, offices, a food court with pop-up units and a performance space. 

Newport city council has described the redevelopment as “potentially the largest market redevelopment in the UK” and it says it will create a “24-hour working/living space”.

This all sounds good, but, the poor old market has been managed to death by the City / Town Council who could never leave it alone. 

Years of faffing about with the buses / bus routes near the site of the market has not helped. That it managed to survive so long is close to miraculous.

If you live in various parts of Gwent or are intimately familiar with your home community, then over the years you will have noticed that redevelopment / regeneration comes and goes in phases, in any particular community or town.

Regeneration schemes will have cleaned areas up, built in cycle routes, created transport plans, pedestrianised streets, reopened them to traffic, re-pedestrianised them and (as is the case in Newport and no doubt elsewhere) made certain streets shared space with both cars and pedestrians (this is not as crazy an idea as it sounds, and it actually works) and so on. 

Parking has been restricted, created and removed, made it free and charged for it, bus lanes have been created, removed and the hours when bus lanes operate varied. 

Now this is all well and good and may reflect the latest trend in regeneration and development, but at the end of the day has it made the places where we live, work and shop any better? 

The one question that tends not to be asked, and hence not answered is: Has the regeneration process or scheme increased or generated wealth in our communities or provided people with the opportunities to get jobs, to go into business for themselves or generate wealth? 

One of the unintended features of redevelopment is that quite often it is (or is perceived as being) driven from the top down i.e. by elected bodies whether they be Town or County Councils or the Senedd. 

Regeneration is a process that merely consults, usually after the plans have been drawn up rather than before, during and after - any process run this way runs the real risk of becoming deeply flawed. 

Local communities and towns and cities of South Wales have over the years has been the recipient of much grant aid, development and redevelopment schemes and initiatives - how can we measure success? 

Measuring a regeneration schemes success should be a key factor in any regeneration scheme. 

This is the key question that needs to be asked - after the cement and the paint has dried, after the development / redevelopment / regeneration professionals have banked the cheque and moved on - have the various schemes made a difference. 

I mean beyond any immediate physical improvements to the environment, have they made a real difference when it comes to wealth generation in the area affected by the regeneration scheme and can the people who live here actually see and benefit from the change? 

If the end result is in reality a makeover, and the targeted community is no better off, save for being bereft of the 'regeneration funds' that have been effectively hoovered up by professional regeneration companies - some of whom make a good living out of regeneration - then we should ask is this success? 

How do you make regeneration projects work beyond the tick box list of the regeneration schemes managers? 

One key component that is often ignored or marginalised during the regeneration process is the communities greatest resource - its people.

If we truly want to build and develop strong sustainable communities, then any regeneration scheme should from the start and at every stage of the process. We don’t need regeneration professionals coming into an area and engaging in a largely token consultation process. 

They should directly talk to local people (who are an asset to the process) rather than at them, and actually find out what they would like to be done, what they actually want for their community and their town.

If you are reusing or renovating old buildings then any regeneration scheme needs to ensure that old buildings can make a sustainable contribution after the regeneration scheme is finished. 

If we do this rather than merely making a token gesture towards public consultation, then any regeneration schemes will, with hard work, really begin to deliver tangible benefits to our communities. 

Regeneration schemes and projects should be bottom up rather than the top down. 

The bottom line should be when spending public money, work it extra hard and squeeze out every single possible benefit and maximise the impact locally of the regeneration process and make every effort to build in local benefits into the tendering process - whether by employing local people, using local resources, local skills and local input. 

Now a plea for a more people focused and community driven regeneration is not driven by nostalgia or about living the past - we have to re-image our urban spaces for the 21st century - but not at the expense of the people who live and make their living within them. 

 

As had been said elsewhere, regeneration should be a process rather than a cash extracting event, that delivers unmeasurable success. 

A NEXT STEP?

Almost half a year ago the First Minister made the right choice about the M4 Relief road. I have been opposed to the project since the 1990's. It's been dropped more times over the years than a questionable county striker. Whats important now - is what happens next to alleviate the traffic problems that regularly clog up our city - the M4 Relief road would have done little to resolve them - despite the promises. If we are serious about giving people a realistic alternative to the car in and around Newport (and elsewhere) then we need decent integrated reliable public transport - without that nothing is going to change. 

Driver training on the Gaer spur (Ian Brewer)

What happens next is now of real significance - there are some small significant and long overdue projects - which would be big wins by way of infrastructure in Newport which should have been completed decades ago. A prime example is that of the proposed re-opening of the railway station at Caerleon - this has been in the structure plan since 1986 - but nothing has been done. Not to mention railway stations at Llanwern and Magor - approved in principle but with no ground broken as the years continue to pass. There are sone relatively simple potentially significant easy wins - which could have a big impact on the congestion problem in and around Newport and on the coastal plain. We need railway stations, with decent facilities and significant park and ride (with sensible walk to routes) at:

• Caerleon / Ponthir , 
• Magor, and 
• Llanwern 

Across the south east, we can start with the Ebbw vale link to Newport needs to be re-timetabled and the line extended to Aberbeeg (as originally promised). Trains already periodically run on this line into Newport - when maintenance is under taken elsewhere. This reinstated service would enable connecting services to be run into Newport - giving commuters to Bristol and further afield an alternative means of getting to and from their places of work. 

Within Newport there is a need to develop a decent system of public transport - based around a light rail / tram network which connects Bettws / Malpas, Duffryn and Pill and Alway / Ringland with the city centre and the railway station(s). At present the residents of Bettws, Pill, Duffryn and Alway / Ringland have no alternative but to drive, use the much reduced bus service or walk. Trams are not a pipe dream they are already an important part of integrated public transport systems in Merton (in south west London), Sheffield, Manchester and elsewhere. They would work equally well in Newport, Cardiff and Swansea and feed people into our main line railway stations. 

Elsewhere in the former county of Gwent there is much work that needs to be done. Our railway stations at Abergavenny, Pontypwl and Cwmbran, Caldicot , Severn Tunnel and Chepstow have all seen some degree of improvement but are barely fit for service. All these stations need improvement and need more stopping services and better facilities hand in hand with the development of secure reasonably priced park and ride facilities. There should be a feasibility study into reopening the branch line to Usk (with a station sited West of the River Usk (with decent park and ride facilities). Along with this there is a case for a park and ride railway station at Little Mill (especially with the proposed hoisting development at Mamihiiad). With all of this we need integrated ticketing - with one ticket coverage all modes of transport - it either well elsewhere in these islands - so why not here? 

The National Assembly also needs to work systematically and over the long term to get long distance freight traffic off our roads and back onto our railways. If you are shipping a container from Neath or Newport to Nuneaton or Namur it needs to be on a train not trundling around the motorway network. Successive Scottish government have had done success with encouraging and incentivising the movement of freight from road back to rail. Hand in hand with this initiative there is a real need to fundamentally change the delivery cycle from last minute to more planned delivery cycle. 

We need workable medium term solutions that will fundamentally impact on our options for moving about our city, the SE and the rest of Wales. What we don't need now is inaction, we gave had plenty of that, combined with poor if not down right bad decision making on the part if government at all levels, be it Westminster, National Assembly and local level - the consequences of which we are all living with every day in the south east and across the rest of Cymru / Wales. The time for excuses us past - what's needed now is action on the ground to begin to sort out our congestion problems and to provide us with decent integrated transport that's fit for the 21st century rather the 20th.

A QUESTION OF NUMBERS...

One of Boris’s promises to the electorate (repeated in a recent letter to Newport West residents) is that a Conservative government would increase the number of police officers in Wales and England by 20,000. 

While many of our hard pressed communities would happily welcome any increase the number of Police officers, in the face of rising crime following period when there has been a persistent thinning of police numbers.

It is perhaps worth remembering that we are some 19,704 police officers in Wales and England down since the Tories (and their eager Liberal Democrat’s coat holders) took office in 2010. 

Perhaps Teresa May, the former Prime Minster and former Home Secretary, was too busy creating hostile climate, to actually oversea the ill thought out reduction in Police numbers. 

It’s also worth noting that these figures apply to Wales and England only, as the Scottish police force has been exempt from Tory cuts due to the fact that control of policing is devolved to Scotland, unlike in Cymru / Wales.

Devolving policing powers would increase the accountability of the Welsh Government; strengthen the democratic process by allowing decisions, which directly impact on the Welsh people to be made, reviewed, revised and changed here in Wales. 

At the end of the day, the Welsh people have a simple democratic right to have a greater say in something so fundamental to civilised community life as policing. This is already the case in Scotland, Northern Ireland, London and Manchester. 

Policing is only one side of the coin, to make devolved policing work, there is also a need to devolve control of criminal justice. I have been long convinced that now is the time is right to devolve policing powers to the Welsh Government in Cardiff. 

Fundamentally policing decisions in Wales need to reflect the needs and concerns of our communities, not simply the on-going cost cutting agenda driven by previous Conservative Prime Minister’s (and a former Home Secretary) and the Ministry of Criminal Justice in London. 

Plaid Cymru has long campaigned rightly to “stop the thin blue line from breaking” and to boost funding for the Welsh police forces. 

The full devolution of policing would have meant the Welsh police forces would have been exempt from the Tories’ planned £32 million cut to their budgets and would have benefitted from an additional £25 million through being funded through the Barnett formula meaning a total difference in Welsh police budgets of £57 million between Plaid Cymru and Conservative policy. 

Back in 2017 Plaid Cymru called a vote on devolving policing during the passing of the Wales Bill through the Houses of Parliament. 

We should remember that given the choice of devolving Policing to Wales, the Conservatives voted it down and the Labour Party abstained - so much for standing up for Wales.