“Who should own your community? It’s a question that sounds simple, but the answer is really quite complicated”

Delyth Jewell, who represents Plaid Cymru, is one of four regional Senedd Members serving the South Wales East region.

Who should own your community? It’s a question that sounds simple, but the answer is really quite complicated.

Maybe some of you reading this will own your house with a mortgage, or maybe you’ll rent it. But our homes are made up of so much more than just the buildings where we sleep and eat: they’re the woods where we go for walks, the fields where we played when we were children and where we made our dens in the summer holidays, the hills and rivers that make us all so proud to live in the valleys. So many of these local green spaces and landmarks, though, aren’t owned publicly or by the council – they’re owned by private companies and individuals.

Historically, this worked well with the miners’ welfare organisations. Just about every town or village in the valleys had a miners’ welfare centre or library or snooker hall which were run by, and for the benefit of, miners and the community as a whole. With the decline of the mining industry, these spaces were sold off or gradually abandoned. Our communities are poorer without them.

More often than not, though, when land and assets are bought privately, the community’s stake in them is taken away. We’ve seen a prime example recently, when the treasured Bluebell Woods near Llanbradach was destroyed by a private developer.

My belief is that spaces like these – which are important to local people and the environment – should be in the hands of the community.  It is local people who truly understand the value of these spaces, and it is they who are best placed to manage and care for them.

The community did of course rise up to defend the land, and in a hugely impressive show of strength, won the day. It felt really empowering to walk with fellow campaigners in our peaceful Save Our Bluebell Woods walk: it felt good, it felt like a community taking back what belonged to it. Machines will soon be returning to the wood, but this time to begin the work of restoring what was previously destroyed.

Now, I know it can be argued that what happened to Bluebell Woods was a one-off, since the developer destroyed it without planning permission, meaning that neither the council nor the Welsh Government had done anything wrong. It is of course true to say that very little can be done when a company simply breaks the rules like this. But the whole saga could have been prevented from happening in the first place. Here’s how.

The IWA (Institute of Welsh Affairs) recently published a fantastic piece of work called Our Land, which looks in detail at the state of community rights in Wales.

It found that communities in Labour-run Wales have much fewer rights than in SNP-run Scotland, and even Tory-run England.  Not only that, but communities that try to take ownership of local assets face often insurmountable bureaucratic barriers and obfuscation. 

I recently asked this question to the Labour Minister in the Senedd: “Can the Minister tell me what the Welsh Government’s position is in relation to introducing legislation to empower communities, so that communities in places like Llanbradach, and all over Wales, can ensure that treasured community assets are protected?”

I didn’t receive a response that suggested that this is something that’s high on the government’s agenda.

Here’s what I propose: that the Welsh Government listens to the recommendations from the IWA report by bringing forward a Community Empowerment Bill, that would enable communities to take ownership of local assets that are deemed significant, supported by a Community Asset Fund and a coordinated support package.

But what would all this mean in practice? Quite simply, it would mean that local communities, such as the one in Llanbradach, could decide that the Bluebell Woods is significant enough for them that they could utilise the new powers to take ownership of the land, and draw on public funds to do so.

It usually takes around four years for new bluebells to flower. By the time the bluebell wood is restored, this proposed bill could be enacted in law. Let’s make it happen.