An estimated 55,000 people attended Caerphilly’s Big Cheese Festival over the weekend, despite atrocious weather.
The rain didn’t dampen spirits despite causing the Great Cheese Race to be cancelled on Friday July 24.
Impressive fireworks opened the event as planned and around 50,000 revellers enjoyed music, stalls, performers, falconry, medieval re-enactments and the fun fair on Saturday July 25.
And more than 5,000 people braved torrential rain and high winds to ensure the festival, now going for 18 years, was not a damp squib on Sunday July 26.
Although the numbers are down on last year’s 80,000, organisers Caerphilly County Borough Council maintain the festival was a success.
Someone in the Council, probably all of them, KIngs and Queens of local government democracy, will have to look at the cost of the festival on next years budgets, this continuous strain on ever decreasing Council settlements from the Welsh Assembly is both unsustainable as a priority, and unacceptable as a concept during the current financial strain on the Caerphilly Council.
The Caerphilly Council Cabinet will need to consider this ever increasing
drain of money for this event, and, in fact, the rest of the Council`s
events section budget, how it is being used, and what the real proven
benefits may be to the Borough. A real and proper assessment and
comparison will have to be done, by elected members, are;- cuts to
Care for the Elderly, increases in home care contributions, cuts in
street cleaning, selling off or mothballing libraries, leisure centres,
community halls, and playing fields, increases in burial charges, and
reduced environmental services and increased fees and charges all over
the place, more acceptable, than allowing the private, or third sector
organisers, to take over this Council money pit, and probably create
employment in the process.
You are almost there with your comment, but the council, and the UK Government as a whole, is obsessed with pointless, proper assessments that take years to conduct, but only tell us what we already knew. The Big Cheese must be culled as soon as possible without a costly assessment.
Mothballing libraries is not a bad thing – they are costly and not needed in modern society.
Cutting elderly care – not particularly bad as the elderly need to learn to save more of their money, but if it leaves the elderly vulnerable questions must be raised.
Selling off community centres, leisure centres, and playing fields – not bad either; local group can come together to form a cooperative that runs these things.
Dean, I share with you a deep disquiet that the ‘Big Cheese’ has become stale and is not the sort of event that the council should be staging. I am not so sure about your other examples of where cost savings could be made.
We both agree that education is Wales, the statatury responsibility of WAG and councils, is not good. Libraries often offer poorer people who wish to better their education outside this flawed system their only avenue to study from expensive text books and benefit from a fast internet connection. Libraries today also offer free talks on a variety of subjects, early learning for toddlers, exhibitions by local groups and perform as a point of contact between people and the council services. Good value in my opinion.
I agree that the elderly are not always poor but many are. A decrease in services hits the poorest, as you rightly say the effect on the vulnerable of cuts has to be questioned.
With regard to leisure centres, playing fields and community centres I think that playing fields should remain in public hands and protected from being sold off for ‘developers’ to build yet more houses. Leisure centres may work well privately owned but again need to be protected from being closed and sold for profit.
Community centres can work when in community hands, but still can suffer from being caught up in local authority wrangling. Neuadd Y Parc in Caerfili (where the 2015 election hustings were held) operates without any input of public money. It was built by a local self help group in 1953 and opened in 1955. The previous council agreed that the charitable ground on which it sits should be leased at no net cost to enable longevity of the facility. This was agreed by cabinet five years ago but never enacted by council officers. The trustees now find themselves engaged in the same arguments with council officers over the ownership and future of the hall.
Dean you know that the age related issues mentioned by Idris Vaughan are all means tested provisions, so your point that the elderly who are well off can take of themselves without Council intervention has credability, but, the care and help the council provide, in every case without exception, is to the vulnerable and is precisely what is being put under threat by over spending on `events`, and other `spending` sections of the council, and they are not `citizen` centered.
If pensioners learn to manage their money more carefully when they were younger they would be richer in old age. If they are richer you would have fewer people claiming the means tested benefits.
Currently, the workings of benefits for the elderly means someone who saved all of their life to put total savings above a threshold is entitled to nothing, but someone who did not save, instead they spent, who has savings below a threshold, is entitled to benefits. The breathtakingly ludicrous nature of this means someone who was earning more in their lives but spending more can be claiming benefits but someone who was earning less in their life but saved everything cannot. Hmm…elderly benefits for the wealthy; I am surprised you do not support reform for that.
Of course, I would support reform of wealthy people obtaining benefit due to a scatter gun regulation approach by politicians who are afraid to upset a whole raft of the elederly population.
But it worth pointing out again that the benefits handed out or provided for by Caerphilly council in respect to careing for the elderly in the community, which is the catalist comment which started this debate, are ALL means tested benefit, meaning that only the poorest and most in need get them.
These are `real time`benefits, they do not take account of how Mrs this or Mr That lived their lives BEFORE they feel into `parish need`. Much the same as previously well off working families may have fallen on hard times, lost jobs, lost homes, maybe through ill health sudden illness, or family tragedy, find themselves in a situation of poverty. The old man of the family COULD go on the road, the kids could go into care, and the mother could walk the streets, but that is not the kind of society most reasonable thinking people want to create and bring their children up in, do we deny this family benefits?. because they used to have a big car, they used to go on long holidays, used to have big screen TV`s and may even have contributed to private health care, whilst paying all the usual taxes. Or, do we pay them Council tax benefits, rent benefit if they have to sell their home or it is repossessed, child benefits for school clothes, etc, I for one would, they have previously contributed to the system probably to a greater degree than some others.
Thankfully most elected representatives in this country still believe in helping the vulnerable, the sick and the disabled, and the elederly, and that is a process followed by the reaonable and deep thinking, principalled local councillors who have to wrestle with ever decreasing annual budgets, that is why I agree that the Big Cheese is a disproportionate extravegance of probably at least many tens of thousands of pounds, when that money should be used to eleviate poverty and feed and care for older residents who sometimes cannot take care of themselves.
If the threat of putting them on the street was there, you can guarantee that family would have saved money to cover themselves in hard times rather than buying big TVs or going on exotic holidays. Luxury goods should be bought with disposable income, and any sensible person takes a reasonable percentage of their income to go into a savings or investment account that is not touched unless circumstances change.
The whole ;helping the vulnerable’ is a nonsense debate, since the vulnerable I am referring to are only vulnerable through their own accord by not saving. What you are really saying is you support a state to give anyone who is incompetent at money management unlimited chances.
Also, remember we are talking about the elderly here. Benefits that are NOT retrospectively means tested are part of the problem. I believe in tax system that encourages saving, even if aggregate demand will fall as a result, enabling the government to cut elderly benefits without have a detrimental impact on them. This is sensible economic policy, no wonder it is at odds with your approach of throwing endless amount of money at people while taxing the ‘endless’ wealth of the wealth creators.
There is an old saying, “There but for the grace of God go I”, which beautifully reminds us that none of us are immune from destitution, no matter what provisions we have made.
Someone could have put away a sizeable pension and seen it all taken away by a spouse when divorced, they may have suffered a mental breakdown or suffered from a dozen other unforseen events that resulted in penury in their old age.
It is true that many people are just wasteful but on balance I would prefer that we look after our old people, both the frugal and the spendthrift. They have generally worked and paid taxes, starting work at fourteen in many cases. I would far prefer the old had some comforts in their twilight years rather than paying benefits to lazy people who don’t want to work and newcomers to this country who do very nicely from ‘in work’ benefits that they send to their families abroad.
The Council couldn’t care how much The Big Cheese costs to put on, it’s not their money that they are spending and when it comes to this particular event money probably is no object, and if they gave it over to a private company to run they’d be charged so much to use the castle grounds that it would not be a viable proposition.
They dont use the `castle grounds`, they, we, own the grounds upon which the festival is held. Simply hand it over for the duration, job done,
I stand corrected Trefor thank you, a private company would still run the event better and more efficiently.
I agree, and more cost effective to the public purse.