SIMPLY A BAD DECISION...

News that the local Government minister, Carl Sargeant, has announced that the Abergavenny Improvement Acts (1854 – 1871) are to be repealed is bad news. The removal of these old laws, that ensured that a livestock market be held within Abergavenny, may finally open the door to the building of a supermarket on the site of the current livestock market. This move has long been obsessively championed by Monmouthshire County Council, who will benefit financially from the disposal of site of the livestock market.

Carl Sargeant’s decision while not necessarily the final nail in the coffin of the current livestock market, certainly does not help local people and campaigners, who have been resisting the loss of the livestock market for a number of years. The Welsh Government has over the years seriously failed the people of Abergavenny and the surrounding area and has entirely missed the important issues raised by the protesters.

Conservative dominated Monmouthshire County Council (MCC) desire to dispose of the cattle market site (and the Cattle Market) in Abergavenny to boost the local authorities coffers had come up against the original parliamentary legislation (dating for the 19th century) which give Abergavenny the legal right to hold a market within the town. MCC has long struggled to balance the books for many years having suffered from poor financial settlements over the years, is seeking to dispose of its assets for short term financial gain.

In retrospect MCC should have grasped the opportunity to get things right when it came to planning the long term economic future of Abergavenny - they simply chose not to. The repeated failure to work with concerned local residents, farmers and small businesses to ensure that Abergavenny retains its Cattle Market and it’s fundamentally unique character as a market town, is profoundly depressing.

Across Monmouthshire (and elsewhere in Wales) we have seen the detrimental economic effects on the local economies in both Chepstow and Monmouth (to name but two) of ill-thought out redevelopment schemes. The retention of the cattle market in Abergavenny and potential redevelopment of the unused portion of the site presented a real opportunity to do something different, something that could have addressed environmental and economic concerns.

For some years Welsh Government Ministers (under Section 77 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990) have the power to call in any applications for planning permission for their own determination, something that clearly needed to be done in this specific case. That they have in this case consistently chosen not to do this despite the strength of the case and the importance of the issues raised should raise some serious concerns about the quality of advice given to ministers and the support they get form the civil service, if nothing else.

While I recognise that there is a tendency to consider that development proposals are best dealt with by planning authorities that know their area, its needs and sensitivities, it is pretty that in the case the National Assembly has missed the point entirely. The issues and concerns raised about redevelopment, its economic impact and the lack of impartiality in the planning process are not only important locally, they have a wider relevance across Wales.

The whole sorry process raised issues of more than local importance, issues which are in conflict with national planning policies; issues which will have wide effects beyond their immediate locality; and may give rise to substantial controversy beyond the immediate locality. And that is aside from the significant impact on sites of scientific, nature conservation or historic interest or areas of landscape importance within Abergavenny.

One thing that is clear is that our planning laws are clearly in need of a serious revamp, especially when one of the key beneficiaries (Conservative run Monmouthshire County Council) effectively ran the whole planning process as effective judge, jury (and jury selector), executioner and main financial beneficiary. The effective silence and virtual invisibility of locally elected National Assembly and Westminster representatives on what is (and has been for a number of years) a key local issue is also worthy of note.

Having fought three elections in Monmouth constituency (between 1005 and 2010) I can say that the opposition of the loss of the livestock market has never been about nimbyism, people in and around Abergavenny have never been opposed to balanced well thought out development. The implications of the redevelopment of Abergavenny and its cattle market is one of those cases where there was a real a pressing need to call in the proposed development, yet the Welsh Government and its Ministers (consistently) failed to step up to the mark for the people of Abergavenny.

Perhaps the reason for the failure is down to a combination of poor advice from civil servants to ministers, or a marked indifference on the part of elected representatives of Labour in Wales to any other parts of Wales that fall outside what they perceive as their territory. Whatever the reason, this is a bad decision, one that could have a significant and profound lasting economic impact on the town of Abergavenny and its surrounding area in future years.