Editor,

Jean Miles’ excellent letter (Cambrian News Letters, 6 November ‘So frustrating for residents who are living near the edge’) leads surely to the conclusion that Gwynedd Council should come up with a plan for Fairbourne. One of their schemes is to shut down the village completely in 35 years.

The cost of that is easy enough to calculate in a ‘back of an envelope’ sort of way. First, the people of Fairboune must be provided with residential accommodation to the value of the present stock of homes in the town -- as measured by the council’s own Community Charge assessment of all the homes, as of 2012, i.e before the crash in property values, and then updated by the change in house prices from then till 2054, the putative shutdown date.

Then there is the cost of providing infrastructure - water, sewerage services, road, buses, schools, hospitals, community centres etc. Well, the council should have that sort of figure at their fingertips.

And of course there is the cost of people moving physically to their new homes.

(If homes have changed hands meanwhile, a simple division of the value of each home between stakeholders to such transactions can be made).

As Graham Hogg, Labour’s candidate, observes, the council has no excuse not to have costed options properly by now.

The crucial question, it seems to me, is to ask what sort of contribution Plaid council will make to that shut-down eventuality. So far they have said nothing.

On this issue the Plaid candidate for MP, Liz Saville Roberts, should be pressing the council to earmark its millions in reserves as a down-payment for whatever the Fairbourne plan turns out to be.

No one, absolutely no one, should be out of pocket because of this ungodly threat of a so-called ‘act of God’.

Ian MacIntyre, Flat 6, Shelbourne Court, St John’s Hill, Barmouth.

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