Editor: We residents of Llanidloes are currently being alerted, mostly by means of notices attached to lamp-posts around the town, of Powys County Council’s intention to overhaul on-street waiting/parking/loading, under the provisions of the (Various Streets Llanidloes) (Prohibition and Restriction of Waiting and Loading and Parking Spaces) Order 2022.
A consultation period is in place, ending on 16 October. I’ve already submitted my thoughts to the council’s traffic systems officer at County Hall. They are:
What exactly is the demonstrable need for this overhaul of the current regulations? The existing restrictions work well and are familiar to us all, and I’m not aware that residents and visitors are inconvenienced to any great degree. Perhaps Powys CC has been bombarded by large numbers of residents and business proprietors desperately demanding change – but I doubt it.
It’s widely recognised that county councils and overarching bodies are in receipt from above of annual moneys which they are effectively obliged to spend. Llanidloes seems to be a regular designated target for top-down expenditure of this kind: we have seen it all before. In recent years Powys CC have hatched plans for a pitifully ill-conceived residents’ parking permit scheme, which was quickly shown to be entirely unviable and unwanted; and a one-way traffic scheme, prompted partly by the need to protect the town’s Grade I listed market hall, which was clearly drawn up by bureaucrats with little or no first-hand knowledge of the town and its traffic movements. Most notoriously, the Welsh Assembly Government have recently sought to gain approval to extend the town’s bypass and create a new overtaking lane, a concept so entirely wrong-headed and at odds with the prevailing climate crisis, as well as being of no benefit whatever to Llanidloes residents, that it was met by unprecedented opposition and will hopefully be finally abandoned. Unsurprisingly the residents of Llanidloes have learned to be innately suspicious of this kind of misguided largesse, and have shown themselves more than capable of vigorous protection of the town they love.
The new Order and the accompanying maps show a complex multi-level system, with different times allowed for parking, disabled parking, loading etc. For example, a particular street may be marked out for ‘Limited Waiting Mon–Fri 8am–6pm 1 Hour No Return 1 Hour’. Clearly all these regulations will need to be rigorously enforced – the entire exercise is otherwise completely pointless and a tragic waste of time and money.
Among the documentation accompanying this new proposal mention is made of the ‘civil enforcement officer’ and the ‘civil enforcement team’. Currently, it’s common knowledge that the town is visited perhaps once a month by a peripatetic traffic warden who moves daily from town to town (what an unenviable job); when he is here, the word soon spreads, and everybody obediently complies with the regulations until he leaves.
This is presumably the ‘civil enforcement officer’ to whom they refer. Given the complexity of the new proposal, at least one full-time ‘enforcement officer’ in Llanidloes must surely be part of the plan. Without enforcement, the Order is a worthless exercise and an abysmal waste of precious resources. So, is an enlarged ‘civil enforcement team’ affordable through council tax?
Again, I have my doubts. I and other residents will await developments following the consultation period with keen interest.
Andrew Hawker,
Llanidloes
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