Hywel Dda Debt Cancelled

Assembly Minister Health Minister Edwina Hart today announced the writing off of Hywel Dda NHS Trust’s historic debts totalling £40.469 million.

The debts were accumulated by Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Derwen, and Carmarthenshire NHS Trusts prior to their amalgamation into a single Hywel Dda NHS Trust last year and will now be paid by the National Assembly.

Of course the campaign to have the debt written off hasn’t half been helped by the presence of Ceredigion’s Assembly Member Elin Jones in the Assembly Cabinet alongside Edwina Hart.

The commencement of the £30 million extension scheme for Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth is expected in the next three months.

Whilst the decision to cancel the debt must be a tremendous relief to Hywel Dda Trust, no one should assume they are now in the money as they will still struggle to break even this financial year.

New gate opens up 300 yards of cycle path

Sometimes small things can make a big difference. A simple little thing like a new gate at the entrance to the footpath at Llanbadarn Fawr level crossing has connected Llanbadarn village to the Rheidol cycle trail which links Aberystwyth town centre to Capel Bangor and beyond. The 320 yard path alongside the railway line that links to the trail was previously only accessible to walkers through a small ‘kissing gate’.

Following co-operation between the University, who own the land, and Ceredigion Council, this has now been expanded into a ‘cycling kissing gate’ that bikes can be wheeled through.

Next year it’s hoped to add a further spur to the Rheidol trail by taking the cycle path across the railway line by the green bridge and alongside the river to Parc yr Onnen, linking the east side of Llanbadarn also.

Ten years ago there were no cycle paths around Aberystwyth. We now have the Rheidol trail and the Ystwyth trail. Although these have seemed painfully slow to develop at times, the latest developments show that the expansion of the town’s cycle network hasn’t been forgotten and that extending it can be very easy.

75 People Turn Up at Empty Town Hall

Today was the first working day since Aberystwyth Town Hall was emptied of County Council staff, leaving just the Town Council Clerk and his secretary rattling around in the large building.

Despite the door being locked with a notice on explaining that County Council services are no longer provided there, the Clerk had to answer the door bell and explain the situation no fewer than 75 times throughout the day, thus demonstrating the folly of leaving the town centre without an access point for County Council services .

First Ysgol Gymraeg Celebrates 70 Years

The pivotal role of Aberystwyth in the survival of the Welsh language was emphasised on Friday with the 70th birthday celebrations of the first Welsh language school. Originally begun in 1939 with just seven pupils at the now demolished old Urdd centre in Llanbadarn Road, the Ysgol Gymraeg has been sited in Plas Crug Avenue since 1989 and is now a thriving school of 370 pupils. In February the school’s latest Estyn Report awarded it the maximum Grade 1 in all seven categories. Only 48% of children are from homes where the main language is Welsh but all reach full fluency by the end of the second year.

The school’s success in attracting children from outside Aberystwyth is sometimes blamed for threatened closures of small rural schools. However moot points like this are massively outweighed by the school’s proven quality and its crucial role in the development of the Welsh language in the Aberystwyth area.

Aberystwyth Town Hall Raised in the Assembly

Following on from the article below, yesterday Nic Bourne, Conservative Assembly Member for Mid and West Wales and an Aberystwyth resident, questioned the Assembly’s Heritage Minister, Alun Ffred Jones (pictured), about the future of Aberystwyth Town Hall.

“The Minister will be aware of the iconic nature of Aberystwyth town hall which, sadly, Ceredigion County Council is proposing to mothball, having built new headquarters costing £15 million. The council is now finding that there is an excess of buildings in Aberystwyth, one of which, predictably, is the town hall, and there is not a ready market for town halls. The town council is interested in buying it back. There is currently a dispute about it but, given the town council’s willingness to acquire it, will the Minister use his good offices to ensure that it is not mothballed, because it is an iconic building, and encourage the two sides—the town council and the county council—to get together so that it can be acquired and continue to be used in the community in Aberystwyth?”

Alun Ffred Jones, Plaid Cymru Heritage Minister, replied,
“ I am happy to encourage the better use of any building, particularly one that, as you said, has such iconic status. If I am able to bring my influence to bear on this issue, I am happy to do that.”

Nic Bourne later commented,
“ I am very pleased that the Heritage Minister has indicated that he recognises the importance of this building and the need to preserve it as a community facility. I very much welcome his influence as a cabinet member in helping to lobby to bring this about. The town hall’s accessibility and central location means that this is a building which the people of Aberystwyth traditionally identify as their own civic centre.”

Town Council to Remain in Rapidly Emptying Town Hall

Aberystwyth Town Council will be staying in the Town Hall following last minute negotiations with the County Council. The Town Council use just two offices in the large building which is being vacated next week as all other departments move to the new County Council offices in Boulevard St Brieuc (the picture above shows packed cases ready to go). The Town Council’s presence in the iconic building will mean that it will not be boarded up – the fear of many people in the town – but the footsteps of the Town Council’s two employees will certainly echo around the otherwise empty building. And they may be spending quite a bit of time answering queries they have no jurisdiction over.

Now I understand the new County building – Canolfan Rheidol – has a great many advantages and long-term cost savings from having all council officers working in the same new building. But, in pursuing this, the County Council have taken their eye off the ball in terms of their service to the public. Maintaining a County Council presence in the town centre - the new building is almost a mile out of town - should have been part of the plan all along. The point has been made many times over the past year but it’s fallen on deaf ears. Now that the crunch has come people in the Council are starting to take notice.

At the very least the public pay office, where local people go to pay their bills, should be maintained in the town hall together with a front desk to deal with public enquiries. That’s what local residents need and expect. And the offices left empty should be made available to some of the many local charitable organisations in severe need of these facilities.

In any other country in the world, leaving a fine building like Aberystwyth’s Town Hall almost empty would be seen as a terribly poor reflection on the competence of the local authority. Ceredigion Council should wake up and take steps to maintain its presence in this symbolic town centre building.

Y Crynwyr yn Sir Aberteifi

Cyflwyniad yn Gymraeg gan Dr. Owain Evans
fel rhan o wythnos y Crynwyr

Dydd Mawrth 6ed Hydref, 7.30 pm
Tŷ Cwrdd y Crynwyr, Maes Maelor, Penparcau, Aberystwyth

Mwy o wybodaeth: 01970 – 610056
neu gethine45@yahoo.co.uk



The Quakers in Cardiganshire

A talk in English by Dr. Owain Evans
as part of Quaker week

Monday 5th October, 7.30 pm
Quaker Meeting House, Maes Maelor, Penparcau, Aberystwyth

More information: 01970 – 610056
or gethine45@yahoo.co.uk

Council in Disarray Over Town Hall

I was contacted yesterday by the local paper asking about the future of Aberystwyth Town Hall in Morfa Mawr/Queens Road. The County Council seem in disarray about the building’s future. The Finance Department staff currently housed there amongst others are due to move to the new council offices at Parc y Llyn on Friday week, leaving the building almost empty. At one time there was an intention to move the town library there. Now there’s a funding problem with this and in the short term the building is to be ‘mothballed’, i.e. closed but maintained in good order until someone comes up with an idea. The Town Council, which occupies two small rooms there, have been told they will have to move out and have been half-promised another central location (at least they won’t be moving out of town).

Looking down Portland Street towards the Town Hall (above) it seems almost unthinkable that the building should simply be abandoned. It’s not as grand as the original, which was burnt down on 8th September 1957, but the building and it’s position at the junction of two roads has an imposing look about it that dignifies the town.

I've got mixed feelings about the new County Council Offices at Parc y Llyn. I hear the criticism about extravagance in difficult economic times but I can also understand the case for a new building meeting modern standards in one place rather than the patchwork of old buildings dotted all over town that council workers are currently housed in.

But it’s absolutely essential that the County Council maintain a presence within the town centre for the many people who need to make payments or enquiries etc whilst doing their shopping or in their lunch hour. It's just not good enough that these people should all have to trek a mile out to Parc y Llyn. With the Town Hall set to empty, those people are entitled to ask why it can't be kept open as an easy town centre access point to Council services.

Council Opens the Doors

Ceredigion County Council is opening the doors of its new building at Parc y Llyn, just outside Aberystwyth to the general public next Monday 21st September. Conducted tours of the building, which will be a workbase for 400 employees, will be held on the hour from 10am until 4pm.

I’ve covered some of the issues around the building here and here but one question I’ve constantly been asked is how is the building funded. Here’s the answer:
£4.1m via the general capital allocation given by the Welsh Assembly Government
£2.0m via capital receipts from the sale of surplus offices
£8.9m via prudential borrowing.

I’m told that the savings made from substantially reduced energy costs will go some way towards offsetting the interest payments but the actual figures on this are hard to come by.

Capel Bach Conversion

Y Capel Bach, a tiny historic chapel in Stryd Newydd / New Street, Aberystwyth, is to be converted into a dwelling after planning permission was passed this week.

The chapel was built in 1853 and run as a stable house before being used as a meeting place by the Quakers followed by the Unitarians. A plaque on the outside commemorates David Ivon Jones, a regular worshipper there who emigrated for health reasons and eventually became one of the founders of the South African Communist Party.

The building has been a derelict curiosity for many years and it’s to be hoped that the conversion is done sympathetically.

A487 - Time to Act

Last night I happened upon another serious accident on the A487 between Blaenplwyf and Llanddeiniol, just south of Aberystwyth. I was second on the scene (behind the author of a recent well-received book on R. S. Thomas) and found three young men having just emerged miraculously unscathed from a car that was lying on its roof in the road. Judging from the state of their car, they were all very lucky to be alive. No other cars had been hit.

This is the third serious accident I’ve seen seen on this stretch of road this year and only last month a motorcyclist was killed. It’s a tempting spot to overtake following a series of bends at either end but is deceptively short at high speed and cars seem to run out of road. Since 2006 the A487 through Ceredigion has seen nine people killed and 136 injured, 44 of them seriously.

Today Ceredigion Council Leader Keith Evans issued a press release calling for a road realignment, presumably with the idea of lengthening the straight stretch and improving visability. Despite being identified as an accident blackspot, this part of the A487 doesn’t feature in the Assembly’s recently published National Transport Plan.

There’s no doubt that something has to be done - people are dying. However, given that we’re not going to see a dual carriageway here (nor would want to), it could be argued that, rather than making overtaking slightly less dangerous, in pure road safety terms it would make more sense to actually put in another bend to rule out high speed overtaking as an option altogether.

Diolch i Dogfael am y llun

New Council Offices - Green Transport or Traffic Chaos? Or Maybe Both.

I’ve recently given credit where it’s due to the excellent green energy credentials of the new council offices due to open next month on the outskirts of Aberystwyth. Now for a more difficult issue – transport arrangements for the site.

Whilst the current council offices are dotted all around the town centre, with easy access to the town’s car parks, the new offices – Canolfan Rheidol - are the best part of a mile outside the town. 465 staff will be moving there whilst the number of car parking spaces provided is 201. I haven’t got the figures for the new Assembly building next door but I imagine they will be quite similar, thereby doubling the problem.

Of course, at any given time a number of staff will be on annual leave or working off site and many staff already walk, cycle, bus to work or car share. But even taking this into account, in a dispersed rural area where public transport to work often isn’t an option, the difference between the figures suggest a problem; especially when you consider there will be no parking places at all for visitors to the building wanting to stay more than an hour, not even for invited guests who may have travelled some distance. You don’t have to be Jeremy Clarkson to think that’s quite tough. The distance from the town’s car parks isn’t unwalkable of course – the nearest one will be about half a mile away - but it’s certainly a lot further than people are used to walking for business purposes.

Over, then, to the Council’s Highways Department who’s hour has come. When it became clear there wasn’t going to be sufficient land or money to cater for everyone who’d like to drive to the building the department were suddenly given an opportunity to put into action all the green transport strategies they’d been thinking about for the past few years. So staff moving to the new building are being presented with superb cycling facilities, new bus stops, car share schemes and a Park & Ride together with flexible working hours and opportunities to work from home. Coupled with these incentives is a blunt refusal to allow any member of staff living within the boundaries of Aberystwyth or Llanbadarn to use the building’s car park at all.

Figures from a recent survey show that council staff are already considerably better than the Ceredigion average at making green transport choices. Even so, the same survey indicates that demand for staff parking places is still likely to exceed supply.

At least staff will have been fully briefed and know what to expect. The biggest problem may well be with visitors. The number of people visiting the various council offices in town each day must number well into the hundreds and the new building is being billed as a one-stop shop for all of them. I don’t envy the car park attendants standing by a barred entrance with the task of telling visitors the nearest car park for them is half a mile away at the Park & Ride from where they can catch the next bus back. Although this kind of scenario is already happening in many places, it’s new to Aberystwyth.

Now human beings, including those who should know better, are notoriously recalcitrant when it comes to their car-related behaviour. I remember being given a lift by a fundamentalist green activist. On the journey he was full of all the familiar complaints about poor roads and slow drivers in front, until I pointed out that he was supposed to be in favour of all that. Many perfectly intelligent, community-minded people, despite the best attempts to educate them about alternatives, will always try to get their cars to as close to where they’re going as possible.

The question is, given this, where are those excluded from the building’s car park, and bull-headedly intent on finding a nearby parking spot, going to go? Residential streets near the site await the opening of the new buildings with trepidation. It could be an interesting exercise into what happens when some good principles come up against the reality of people’s transport choices, a reality that more urban councils have had to face years ago. This summer there has been just a single traffic warden for the whole of Aberystwyth due to the Council Cabinet’s stubborn refusal to take over responsibility for parking enforcement from a police force willing them to do so.

In many ways the Council’s Highways department is being very brave in attempting to confront the sheer impossibility of our society’s car expectations, even if this has been forced on them by the restrictions of the site. There's a green transport argument that says that, given people’s mesmeric attachment to their cars, the only way we will ever learn to act green is to provide no car facilities whatsoever and, only when that results in traffic chaos, will we finally learn to make environmental choices. It looks as if we may be about to see that theory put to the test in Aberystwyth.

Diolch

I’d like to thank anyone who had the generosity to vote this blog in at number 45 (out of 105) in this year's Welsh Blog Awards. I suppose it’s not bad for a blog about only one small town. I’ve no idea how many people have to vote in order to attain the dizzy height of number 45, quite possibly a very small number indeed. Even so, whoever you are, thank you.

Funding Announced for New GP Surgery in Aberystwyth

National Assembly Health Minister Edwina Hart today announced full funding for a new primary care centre on Penglais Hill in Aberystwyth whilst on a visit to Bronglais Hospital.

The new health centre, which will house a GP Surgery, pharmacy and university creche, received planning permission in September last year but, despite the site being cleared and fenced off in readiness for building, funding for the project had stalled until now.

The scheme is led by local GPs at Padarn Surgery who are currently housed in an 1880s terraced house in the town centre and will enable them to expand from their current 9,000 patients.

The site (seen above) is sensitive as it’s currently a green space on the northern approach to the town and bordering a hidden beauty spot known as the Dingle. However the developers, being local themselves, seem to have understood the concerns of nearby residents and employed landscape architects from Conwy to put together a scheme retaining the majority of trees on the site. Meanwhile, local campaigners acted to have a footpath running alongside the site designated as a public right of way.

Building is expected to start soon and the new surgery is planned to open in April 2011. Edwina Hart also gave reassurances about the Assembly’s commitment to the Bronglais Hospital expansion scheme.

Council Succumbs to the Plastic Tide

Wednesday’s decision of Ceredigion Council’s Development Control Committee to allow around 50 new plastic UPVC windows in a University hall of residence has disappointed Aberystwyth Town Council who strongly objected to the plans.

The Town Council are waging a campaign against the increasing replacement of attractive wooden windows in the town with UPVC and Cllr Mark Strong has a front page article on the issue in this month’s edition of Yr Angor, the town’s papur bro. Although the university is far from the centre of town and has hundreds of UPVC windows anyway, the Town Council felt that the scale of the scheme and the opportunity of the planning application provided a good opportunity to test the commitment of the County Council and the Assembly towards sustainability issues.

As well as the clear aesthetic superiority of wood, there are strong environmental arguments against UPVC. It uses eight times the amount of energy to manufacture as wood. In both its manufacture and disposal, UPVC creates toxic chemicals which are released into the environment. Every ten UPVC windows use half a tonne of CO2 more than the same number made of of wood. And there are certainly a lot of windows in the university building in question.

In recent years UPVC manufacturers have been mounting a vigorous campaign to convince people that their product is in some way environmentally friendly. This is based mainly around a big increase in the use of recycled plastic in the industry coupled with the argument that the cheapness of their windows helps to increase the take-up of energy-saving double glazing. But, although the increased recycling is undoubtedly a good thing, it’s a deeply flawed argument because this only delays the real problem. Unlike other recyclable materials which biodegrade, when plastic finally comes to the end of its life it’s consigned to landfill where it lies for hundreds of years leaching chemicals into the earth.

Of course the main reason for the use of UPVC is its relative cheapness and low maintenance. This is a real consideration for ordinary residents on low wages with limited time. But, although it may be cheaper in the short-term, a study by Camden Housing has found that well maintained timber is actually 25% cheaper over the whole life cycle because it lasts much longer. Presumably the University is here for the long term.

The ironic thing is that the University is stuffed with clever environmentalists who, if they’d been asked, would have told their estates department all this. You might expect that the University as an institution would use its own intellectual resources to pursue environmental best practice.

Guidance in both the Ceredigion Unitary Development Plan and the Assembly’s Planning Policy Wales encourages the use of sustainable materials. The Council’s planning department therefore contacted the university asking for this but were apparently met with a refusal on the basis that something more sustainable would double the cost of the project.

The officers didn’t feel that the policy guidance was strong enough to win a fairly inevitable appeal to the Assembly in the case of a refusal, leaving the Council with costs to pay. On hearing this the majority of the committee voted to approve the application.

I’m not blaming the Council’s planning officers – they may well be right about the likelihood of losing an appeal and at least they tried. But if the Assembly is serious about sustainability it really needs to make its planning policies far more robust because, if ordinary people can’t afford not to use UPVC and big institutions say they can’t either, organisations like the Town Council need much stronger support if they’re to stand against the plastic tide.

Whilst all the debate was happening, the University had pushed ahead and put the new windows in anyway - without planning permission. In the face of such apathy from much bigger fish, what’s an environmentally concerned tiny Town Council to do?

Traffic Delays - Is the Problem in our Heads?

The local paper contacted me the other day asking my thoughts about recent traffic delays around Aberystwyth caused by various roadworks. They were asking if the tourist season was the best time of year to be doing this work. Then it occurred to me that I’d been asked a similar question before, but at an entirely different time of the year. And I wondered, is there actually any time at all when people don't mind roadworks?

The tourist season may seem at first like a bad time to do these works, but then tourists aren’t in a hurry, the university students aren’t here, many local people are on holiday and there are no school runs happening twice a day. So the timing could be worse and I suspect reasons would be found against roadworks at any time.

The blockages to Park Avenue/Boulevard St Brieuc in Aberystwyth are being caused by two different sets of work - a sensible bit of co-ordination it could be argued. At the Llanbadarn end bus stops and pedestrian refuges are being built to serve the new government buildings, due to open next month, in an attempt to make it easier for people to reach the buildings without a car. At the same time, at the town end, a new rising water main is being laid to reduce the incidents of sewage flooding in the town centre, currently running at a very smelly three incidents a year.

Then, on the Llanbadarn Road approach, traffic has been delayed by changes being made to the entrance of Penweddig school, aimed at making the road safer for schoolchildren when they return in September. All this is worthwhile work.

Of course, we've all seen situations where roadworks could have been better planned and co-ordinated. But why is it seemingly so important that cars aren’t delayed for even two minutes, not even for clearly important work?

Maybe we ourselves should take more responsibility for our own impatience rather than blame the Council or the Trunk Road Agency for trying to improve services. As a car driver myself (as well as a cyclist and pedestrian) I confess to the occasional bout of frustration at delays when I think I need to be in a hurry. But then, in better moments, I switch the car ipod to Pharoah Sanders and try to take it as an opportunity to chill out and contemplate the illusion of haste. Maybe the Council should put on relaxation classes.

New Government Buildings Meet Top Environmental Standard

They may be controversial with the local press, built on a flood plain and utterly alien in looks to the local area but the enormous County Council and Assembly buildings suddenly looming over the eastern approach to Aberystwyth do have one or two things going for them. I’ll cover some of the problems (like how people are going to get to them...) another time. But it’s only fair to highlight that the buildings have been designed with some impressive green energy credentials, with heating and other electricity being provided by a combination of wind energy, solar energy and biomass.

Wind Turbines - It’s the sudden appearance of these, with rotar arms designed for an urban environment, that have made people look up and start to consider that something really innovative might be going on.

Solar Panels - spaced along each roof are a row of seven south-facing solar panels to provide hot water for the buildings.

Bio Mass Heating – Situated on the other side of the railway line from the buildings, the biomass plant provides heating at 2 pence per kilowatt hour as opposed to the current 10p per kw in the council buildings being used now. It’s hoped that the nearby Plas Crug Leisure Centre and Ysgol Penweddig can also be connected up to this from next summer.

All these, along with passive solar design and high insulation standards, combine to bring the buildings into the top, ‘excellent’, category of the BREEAM standard – the system used to rate the environmental performance of non-domestic buildings. As time goes by all these energy-saving measures will give a substantial financial saving compared to the current Council accommodation in various converted 18th and 19th century houses dotted around the town centre.

The opening ceremony for the Council building will be conducted on September 9th with staff moving in during week commencing 25th September. Once they’ve worked out how to get there staff will be able to sit at their desks knowing that they’re working in what will probably be the most energy-efficient council offices in Wales.

Seagulls - calls to bring in the the navy

OK, that’s an exaggeration, but 250 people have recently signed a petition calling for ‘something to be done’ about the seagull problem in Aberystwyth where the gulls (mostly herring gulls to be precise) regularly rip rubbish bags apart and occasionally dive-bomb pedestrians to protect their young.

This is an on-going debate in many seaside towns, especially in the early summer months when young gulls have emerged and their parents are needing more food than usual as well as feeling a bit over-protective.

One thing has to be understood. Even if all the local seagulls were gunned down and their eggs oiled, as some people seem to expect, it would only be a matter of time before just as many were back on the streets again. Because the only reason they’re with us is that we feed them by kindly putting our bin bags containing food waste out for them to tuck into each week. You can hardly blame them - they must think they're welcome. The truth is that the seagull problem is the same thing as our waste problem. And it won’t be solved unless we reduce the reason the birds are here in the first place.

Ceredigion County Council have trialled bin bags made from two grades of thicker plastic but the seagulls just laughed and carried on pecking though them. Placing the bags outside only just before the bin men arrive helps (although the gulls don’t need long to get stuck in) but isn’t possible for working people. Using hard green wheelie bins to put the bags in, or smaller ones to separate the food waste into, is fine in suburban or rural areas but doesn’t work in town centres filled with flats because there isn’t enough space for them inside and they clutter the streets.

The latest idea being suggested is to provide residents with woven bags to place the usual plastic bags inside. Tried apparently successfully in Dartmouth in Devon, these bags actually are beak-proof and can then be posted back through residents’ doors to be used again the following week. Aberystwyth Town Council have asked the County Council’s Environmental Services Department, whose remit the issue is, to attend their next meeting in September to talk through this and other ideas.

If anything the problem has been less severe in Aberystwyth this year, maybe because residents have taken some of the measures recommended. In the meantime, as young gulls grow able to look after themselves and their parents chill out, the problem will lessen anyway until it all starts again next year. The question is, can we sort out what we do with our waste by then?

(Diolch i Harry James am y llun)

Welsh Patagonians in Aberystwyth

Vincente, a Welsh-speaking Patagonian, is seen here playing informally last night at the Morlan Centre in Aberystwyth. A former gaucho (Argentinian cowboy), Vincente is over in Wales to perform at the National Eisteddfod, being held this week in Bala. The event at the Morlan was held to promote Aberystwyth's new twinning with Esquel in Patagonia following the visit there of a delegation from the town earlier this year.

The distance involved will mean that contact betwen the two towns is less than with Aberystwyth's other twin towns of St Brieuc in Brittany and Kronberg in Germany. But the fascination of meeting people who are bilingual in Welsh and Spanish with little English plus the other attractions of the region will ensure that the initial twinning is built on. A group from Esquel, a university town of 30,000 people, are planning to visit Aberystywyth next year with a return trip to South America planned for 2011.

Anyone interested in making their own links or wanting to know more can contact Aberystwyth Town Council at council@aberystwyth.gov.uk

Thanks to Laurie Wright for the picture.

Other links:

http://www.welshpatagonia.com/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esquel

Scallop Dredging Ban Proposed

The National Assembly has launched a consultation into scallop dredging which recommends banning or dramatically reducing the activity in much of Cardigan Bay.

Scallop fishing has become extremely controversial in recent years with large scallop trawlers clunking and scraping their way across the sea bed, scouring everything in their path. It’s reported that for every kilogram of scallops caught, 14kg of other species is destroyed at the same time. Scallops are now fetching £1865 per tonne, the demand recently being boosted by the recipes of celebrity chefs.

Cardigan Bay has two Special Areas of Conservation (SACs), designated because of the variety of animal and plant life. The Cardigan Bay SAC stretches from Moylgrove in North Pembrokeshire up to Aberarth in Ceredigion. The Pen Llyn a’r Sarnau SAC runs from Clarach, just north of Aberystwyth, round to Nefyn on the north side of Pen Llyn. At present around two thirds of these SACs are used for dredging.

The consultation proposes banning dredging in these areas and limiting the size of dredgers and their equipment everywhere else in time for the next dredging season starting on November 1st.

The consultation, being run by the Assembly's Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Elin Jones, can be found at: http://wales.gov.uk/consultations/environmentandcountryside/3256249/?lang=en