bureaucracy, planning and systems

You see these photos of houses being built [pointing at a display on the wall] – there was one in the paper last week – and there was water up to there [indicates his waist]. And the article in the newspaper was saying oh no don’t worry about that, we’ll sort something out, we’ll wait til the water’s receded we’ll just carry on building. Planning laws are archaic. Money for the builders. It’s the economy – we say in welsh don’t we: “Diwedd y can yw geinog”: The bottom line is a few pennies. That’s the biggest barrier isn’t it.

What if we built houses on the sites of derelict factories which are never going to be used again. Take them down. Build your houses on them, don’t go out into the countryside. It’s planning laws, it’s the economy, its economists. In Seattle if you want to build a car park, you take down an old building or a new factory has to go on the site of an old factory. Our political system in this country, the laws, the planning laws, is archaic. Even from ground level up wards all these councilors, parish councilors, county councilors and so on – when I look at old newspapers from the 1870s, it’s the same system. And then you have the planning laws which say oh no you can’t do that there’s asbestos on it. That’s the problem with Ferrodo near Caernarfon – you could put a village there. Just clean it up. Gwynedd has to build so many houses. ¾ of them could go there. Clean it out, put the village there.

My favourite bit of anti-bureaucracy/land ownership is the way that people just ignore the ‘no entry’ signs in the quarry, and create their own paths and routes. I know there was one death in Dali’s hole, and that is awful, but people on the whole work out what is ok to do… we need danger in our lives to feel alive. Otherwise you have to turn to drugs and stuff. Isn’t that why young people are taking so many drugs these days? We’ve bureaucratised the fuck out of life.

I look at the mess that’s been created for the Caernarfon bipass - I’m not just talking about the trees and landscape, they even bulldozed a 5th century well which just shows you how much care they are taking - and the fact that all the traffic has disappeared (during lockdown), and it just shows doesn’t it that planners are only thinking so short term, they aren’t thinking how to change how we do things. They are just doing the same old stuff. The buses are still a mess. People are using their cars more and more and then suddenly, traffic has gone! It must show that there is another way to reduce traffic, so we don’t have to cover every inch with a road. But I really have no confidence at all that these things are even being thought of, let alone worked on. Its hopeless really.

I think there is very very low confidence in the [county] council i’m afraid to say. And the community council is just overwhelmed with so much paperwork. There’s hardly any time to think about things that are longer term or whatever. I like the way that people have started doing things for themselves. We just need a way to let that happen more. Sometimes I think that bureaucracy is suffocating us. It’s stopping us doing the things we - the people who live her - know is needed.

One of the good thing about the really terrible way that the Coronavirus situation has been handled by Westminster is that it has really shown how much value there is in devolution. The independence movement has gained so many new members - I can’t remember the figures exactly, but it is a lot. It is the only way of getting decisions made that would be made thinking of what we need, rather than from so far away in bloody Westminster.

Today if a primary school wanted to go out on a nature trail, they’ve have to arrange it a month in advance. They’d have to do a risk assessment. They’d have to send letters home for permission. So the idea of going out for a walk on a whim has gone, it just involves too much paper work. That’s frightening, the way that children have lost that link between themselves and their environment. I find it disturbing.