Monmouthshire Council considers sports and play facilities
Monmouthshire County Council has produced an action plan and assessment of playgrounds, parks and public areas known as a 'play sufficiency assessment' to give an overview of opportunities to play outdoors.
The council also has £182,619 available this financial year, from a £5 million funding pot agreed between the Welsh Government and local authorities, to improve the quality of play spaces, refurbish playgrounds and support the creation of accessible play spaces and opportunities for children.
How the funding is spent in Monmouthshire is due to be determined by the council's Labour-led cabinet while members of the people scrutiny committee discussed the play report at their June meeting.
Llanelly Hill independent Simon Howarth said more sporting facilities are needed in the north of the county such as a 'three G, four G or whatever five G pitch'.
He said: 'In the winter a lot of children can't do sport and do not have the facilities up here.
'It's virtually impossible in this part of the county. Hockey, football, rugby you name any sport in the winter, in rural locations, it becomes virtually impossible.'
Cllr Howarth said he was also concerned some children prefer to 'go up to their bedroom and go on the telephone or computer' but said that is expensive and not all are able to afford such items.
READ MORE: ALN sessions at Newport splash park face offensive comments
Conservative councillor for Goytre, Jan Butler, asked if the council's play service could run some play sessions in its park, which has been revamped with funding from the community council.
Cllr Butler said when the park was upgraded, using money as a result of a housing development, the local council had also been mindful to include older children which she called in the 'awkward' ages of 10 through to 12.
She said: 'A survey was done and it showed we were missing out on the 10-12 age group, the equipment we've got in now is suitable and they've come back in.'
Play manager Becky Hall said holiday activity days are dependent on funding, with staffing a significant cost, but said she could contact the council in Goytre for further discussion.
It was also noted the quality of play areas are about more than equipment and could also include access to nature and open space with accessibility also an important factor.
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ITV News
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New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Should Labour copy the Danish Social Democrats on migration?
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Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This last chance saloon mentality led to dramatic policy shifts – significantly more coercive than any in the recent Labour tradition – paired with a language of morality and a sense of self-belief that contrasts the more apologetic tone and secrecy of Starmer's Labour. The Danes do not try to debate immigration with their working class voters. They spend their political capital at elections on arguing successfully for traditional left policy – increasing public spending in a society where 88 percent of voters are happy paying some of the highest taxes in the world. Could Frederiksen's example help Labour's least popular Prime Minister in generations? Could it help him win again in those white majority, working class areas the party is currently projected to lose to Reform in 2029? Where Labour needs to be careful is not to re-enact the same decade-long mistake it made with the wholesale adoption of the identity politics of America – without checking its relevance to Britain. The Danish political debate on immigration and multiculturalism orbits around the 'Ghetto Package' of 2018. Introduced by the right, Frederiksen's winning coalition of 2019 continued the policy with few adjustments, save it being renamed the 'Parallel Society Act.' The Act empowers the government to designate areas 'vulnerable' where they exhibit a mix of factors related to a lack of education, low incomes and higher than average crime rates. People that might in a less PC-era have been referred to as 'the poor'. There's a further factor common to all the 'vulnerable' areas – most of their residents are officially designated as 'Non-Western'. This group includes migrants from South America, Asia and Africa and their children. 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Any leader of the left today must be able to face up to the collapsing consensus of the liberal political era, acknowledge the difficult reality between the politically convenient myths, as Denmark did. Among those myths; most parties of the Left in the Western World are parties of the working class. They aren't. Most have spent a generation haemorrhaging working class support and members. Further, after a rate of migration outpacing the rate of housebuilding for a parliament, the majority of the public thinks immigration levels are too high. Especially so those in the left-behind areas that notionally left wing parties should feel a natural compassion and solidarity toward. Another myth is that a multicultural society leads to integration by default. We are beginning to see parallel societies in England – as evidenced by the exceptionally poor levels of English spoken in places like Leicester, a recipe for pariah status. 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If applied as in Denmark, this label would encompass the former Prime Minister, celebrities like Mo Farah, Linford Christie, Idris Elba, Bernadine Evaristo and the Reform chairman Zia Yusuf. Most of all, it would be an enormous mistake to interpret the SDP's success as solely oriented around issues of immigration. By 2022 the issue had largely fallen away from Danish political debate, with only the rump of Danish Democrats (the DPP successor party) still citing it as one of their main political motivations. Frederiksen had succeeded in neutralising the issue, but she had won on a platform of reducing cuts to social welfare and maintaining taxes much higher than in Britain. Her voters in 2022 placed welfare as their highest priority. Labour, boxed in by fiscal rules and an unwillingness to make the case for taxation, is about to enact the biggest cuts to social security since the coalition. 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The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
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Our industrial decline gives a lie to Better together claims
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Prestwick Airport, which is owned by the Scottish Government, has seen large numbers of US war plans landing and being refuelled on their way to wage war on Iran and to assist the Israeli war effort. It's time the Scottish Government closed this route for war by banning US warplanes at Prestwick. Secondly if this war in the Middle East extends to a global war Scotland's nuclear base at Faslane will be the number one target for attack and if it's hit then much of Glasgow will disappear surely it's time that this expensive and ineffective nuclear base was closed. Thirdly Scottish arms industries are supplying the Israeli war machines with vital spare parts and it's time this was ended. Of course I realise that none of this can be achieved while Scotland is part of the UK and where Keir Starmer's Labour Government is guilty of failing to condemn Israel for genocide in Gaza or the US for its warlike interventions' instead they are grovelling to Donal Trump in the hope of crumbs from his table. Support for Scottish independence has reached a new high of 56% recently. Now let's turn that into a pro-independence majority in the Scottish elections next year. If that happens the Scottish Parliament should declare our independence and end our complicity in war and instead make Scotland a beacon for peace in the world. Hugh Kerr, Edinburgh. • I'm an idiot. I admit it. I believed Donald Trump when he said before his election that there would be no more of America's endless wars far from America's shores. Instead he has thrown in his lot with America's triad of evil – the military industrial complex, the Neocons, and the powerful Israeli lobby. Benjamin Netanyahu, facing three charges of corruption at home, has achieved his long-held ambition of bringing the United States into a war with Iran. Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine. He hasn't. He promised to bring peace to the Middle East. He hasn't. Instead he has continued with his country's history of bombing countries and killing thousands. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Vietnam. Cambodia. Laos. Iraq. Somalia. Libya. Syria. Yemen. Iran. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. William Loneskie, Lauder. Donald Trump (Image: PA)Give us back our licence fee BBC Scotland boasts that Scotland gets 90% of its licence fee for funding. Given the heavy Anglo-centric bias of the BBC platforms funded by the UK-wide licence fee (BBC News 24, Radios 4 and 5 etc), why don't we have 100% of our licence fee back, and use it in Scotland to make programmes relevant to us, our history and culture? Scots traversed Europe for 500 years, then the globe for the next 300, so it need not be parochial. There is also income from BBC Commercial, which brings in a couple of billion pounds a year. Why does Scotland not share in that? GR Weir, Ochiltree. Politicising the bus pass The US Government's cackhanded launch of a 'Trump card' golden visa scheme, its promotional card bearing the visage and signature of that country's current elected head of state, conflates state functions with the personal identity of an incumbent officeholder. That sort of nonsense befits authoritarian tyrannies not democracies Sadly but somehow not surprisingly, the shambles echoes the sorry state of Scotland's bus passes. Rather than simply calling them bus passes, as happened for decades, the separatist regional government emblazons them with the crux decussata. They carry the irrelevant legend 'Saltire cards' (not even their formal name), predictably stylised without a space. English bus passes are at least more suitably named to reflect their purpose. They do bear a St George's Cross though: Scottish separatists' divisive identity politics have spread poison down south, alas. Ought one, though, to call Scotland's bus passes merely 'bus passes'? The scheme's website describes what is properly known as the national entitlement card as 'Scotland's National Smartcard', again grammatically wrong as well as ideologically questionable. In principle, enabling some local government services to be offered digitally could be a helpful move. But an overtly politicised design combined with the Orwellian whiff of identity cards introduced by the back door bear the grubby fingerprints of nationalist authoritarianism. Witness their unthinking use on buses even by primary school pupils. Christopher Ruane, Lanark.
