Parent power should persuade council

In an extraordinary move last week the county council opened a new five-week consultation on its plans for the organisation of secondary schools in Haverfordwest. This followed the consultation on exactly the same issue that has taken place for most of this year and which has now been declared null and void. What is going on?

The Council wants to merge Sir Thomas Picton and Tasker Millward schools into a new English language secondary school and at the same time create a new Welsh medium secondary school in Haverfordwest. Most people agree that this.  However, the schools and most pupils and parents don’t agree with the Council’s proposals for taking away their sixth forms and creating a new Sixth Form Centre at Pembrokeshire College.

Indeed, there has been overwhelming and vehement opposition to this proposal. It's hard not to conclude that the Council’s main reason for re-opening the consultation for a much shorter period is a cynical mechanism to disregard this opposition.

It’s hard not to conclude, either, that the whole of the previous consultation was undertaken in bad faith. That’s because the Council had already made up its mind on the need for sixth form collaboration with Pembrokeshire College. Well before the consultation started last January the Council had forged links with the College to reorganise post-16 learning in Pembrokeshire as a whole, and not just Haverfordwest. Eventually, all Pembrokeshire’s post-16 funding would be routed through the college, which would also take responsibility for all 14-16 vocational learning. The local authority and the College commissioned a joint review which recommended the creation of a Sixth Form Centre. They then jointly appointed a transformation manager and an estates manager responsible for implementing the scheme.

But when they went out to consultation they ran into a brick wall of opposition in Haverfordwest and also in St David’s and Fishguard where parents were worried either by threats of schools closures or the removal of their sixth form. The local authority’s plans for centralising sixth form provision at Pembrokeshire College will also affect Milford Haven, Pembroke Dock and Tenby.

If the county council were to follow the responses they received in the last consultation they would do the following. They would establish a new 11-19 English-medium secondary school on the Sir Thomas Picton site and a new 11-16 Welsh-medium secondary school on the Tasker Millward site, making it clear that if there is demand after five years the latter will be extended to create a sixth form. Pembrokeshire College would focus on its primary purpose of providing excellent vocational courses, though pupils throughout the county would still be able to choose to study A-levels there. The secondary schools at St David’s and Fishguard would negotiate a federal arrangement with the new English-medium school in Haverfordwest to provide sixth form courses.

Is this argument about the best way to educate out children in Pembrokeshire? Or is it about shoring up the finances of Pembrokeshire College and about lightening the education responsibilities of the local authority? The Council now has a month to persuade us that the educational prospects of our children are uppermost in their thinking.

Unfairness of the pesky parking tax

Few things are more calculated to provoke irritation and opposition in Pembrokeshire than car parking charges in our town centres. Witness the 8,893 people who signed a petition against them in St Thomas Green near the centre of Haverfordwest. Or the people from Goodwick who protested outside County Hall last week against proposals to charge in the town’s Station Hill car park.

Why is the opposition so intense in this part of Wales when elsewhere, especially in city centres like Cardiff and Swansea, charging for parking is long established and relatively uncontroversial? Pembrokeshire Council’s Head of Paid Services Ian Westley says its because nobody wants to pay for something they aren’t already paying. But it’s not that simple.

There’s a clue in one argument against the proposals to charge in St Dogmaels’ High Street. Local councillor Mike James said, “St Dogmaels is a village not a town and it is not somewhere where people come to shop or browse.” He added that the community was being treated like Narberth and Haverfordwest and that was not fair.

There is a sense in Pembrokeshire that all our villages and towns are in a similar position, certainly in comparison with large urban centres in southeast Wales. For instance, many people who pay for car parking in Cardiff are commuters or shoppers who live outside. For them parking fees operate as a congestion charge. And people who live close to or inside cities have a real alternative choice with public transport. If they’re over sixty they can use their free bus pass.

It’s not the same in rural Wales. Here many people have no choice but to travel by car. For them parking charges are in effect just another tax, and one that does not vary according to their ability to pay.

It is noteworthy that a while ago the Welsh Government stopped the NHS from imposing charges in hospital car parks. The argument was that it was unfair to impose charges on outpatients and people visiting friends or relatives in hospital. The same certainly applies in Goodwick where the Station Hill car park is widely used by patients at the adjoining Health Centre.

There’s another consideration, too. Many of our towns are run-down with shops boarded up, to a great extent the result of the poor planning by the county that has led to a rash of out-of-town developments. Imposing parking charges in town centres will only make this worse.

So what could be an alternative income for our cash-strapped council for which, as Ian Westley says, “every little helps”? How else could the council collect the £12m it hopes to raise from the proposed new parking charges? We urgently need to up-date the value of properties across the county, the basis upon which council tax is calculated. The last such re-valuation in Wales was in 2005. Since then the value of properties has risen considerably. An up-to-date re-evaluation would result in putting more properties into higher tax bands. It would mean asking the better off to pay a bit more. That would be a fairer way to raise the money Pembrokeshire needs.

Hobbit House lessons on eco-friendly planning

Pembrokeshire's Hobbit House challenges planners

The on-going saga surrounding the so-called ‘Hobbit House’ in north Pembrokeshire epitomises all that is most frustrating about the county’s planning system. Here we have a young couple, like so many other young people desperate to get on the housing ladder, who have taken matters into their own hands in an imaginative and eco-friendly way. In the process they have confronted an unfriendly planning system in county hall, won plaudits from architectural celebrities, mobilised a world-wide social media campaign, and dragged in the Welsh Government’s planning inspectorate.

Megan Williams and Charlie Hague and their new born son Eli moved into their hobbit-style roundhouse in the garden of Megan’s parent’s home in Glandwr near Crymych in 2012. It had taken them a year to self-build at a cost of  £12,000. It’s a remarkable, individually designed structure that reflects Charlie’s woodworking skills. Timber-framed, its walls are straw bales to conserve energy, and the roof is made of turf. Inside is a hobbit’s paradise. Outside the single-storey dwelling occupies a secluded spot, well out of sight. It overlooks a large pond in a garden where Megan grows raspberries, blackcurrants, gooseberries, redcurrants, whitecurrants, strawberries, and rhubarb for sale. The trouble is that Megan and Charles did not apply for planning permission for the building in advance – probably they had no detailed plans before they started – and only did so retrospectively.

Predictably, last July the county’s planning committee turned them down, by nine votes to four. Haverfordwest councillor Peter Stock said, “I do not think there is anyone in Wales who would be against this development. I think it is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.” But Lampeter Velfrey councillor Rob Simpson, Cabinet Member for Housing and Sustainability said that despite the building’s relatively low visual impact, it eroded the rural character of its surroundings and represented “an unsustainable form of development in terms of distance from day to day facilities.” He went on to say that he would hate to see the building pulled down but that letting it stay would set a precedent. And he added, “I hope that we can find a way so that this development can remain, either at the Assembly level or whatever, but unfortunately there are rules and regulations that we must follow.”

Megan and Charlie lodged an appeal against the county council and a hearing was held in Hermon community hall last week. The Welsh Government’s Planning Inspector Kay Williams will announce a decision in the next couple of months. But she hinted last week that she might be minded to stay an execution of the hobbit house so long as a sustainable design and management plan for it can be agreed with Pembrokeshire County Council.

What this case tells us is that our planning procedures should move away from what seems to be an automatic prior presumption against development. This is certainly the case with the National Park, and is often the case with the County Council, especially with individual applications. Instead we need an approach that asks, “How can we co-operate together to ensure that developments can be allowed to proceed on a community friendly and environmental basis?”