The council that has gone five years without a debating chamber

Martin Shipton

Five years after going into lockdown, one Welsh local authority has yet to resume face-to-face council meetings.

Covid-19, coupled with a decision to knock down the old civic centre in Ebbw Vale, has left Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council with no choice but to hold all its meetings online.

One of the consequences is that some members of the controlling 21-strong Labour group have never physically met each other. The council has 33 members altogether.

Hybrid meetings

A councillor who didn’t want to be named told Nation.Cymru: “Whoever heard of a council without a council chamber? But that’s what we’ve got.

“Obviously a lot more people are working from home since Covid, but other councils still hold meetings that councillors can attend, even if they are hybrid, with some people attending remotely.

“But in Blaenau Gwent, even Labour group meetings are held remotely. It means you don’t get the chance to have proper discussions with colleagues – meeting online isn’t the same and lacks spontaneity. And it’s certainly the case that there are councillors elected for the first time in 2022 who haven’t physically met all their colleagues in the group.

“As things stand, no decision has been made about creating a new council chamber, so the present arrangements will carry on indefinitely.”

Impact assessment

At a meeting of the council held in July 2023, councillors discussed a “retrospective integrated impact assessment” that looked at the pros and cons of closing the former council headquarters and moving to the library-based Community Hubs model of service delivery.

The assessment was written following criticism from Audit Wales in its ‘Springing Forward’ report on the council, dated the previous November.

Audit Wales said Blaenau Gwent residents had not been consulted on the move from providing council services at the Civic Centre to hubs, and that decisions should be accompanied by impact assessments.

Following the demolition of the Civic Centre, the council’s headquarters is now on the first floor of the General Offices in Ebbw Vale, previously used by the town’s steelworks, which closed in 2002.

Rooms in the building are not big enough to accommodate all councillors, staff and members of the public at the same time – and there is no debating chamber – so council meetings are still held online.

Council leader Cllr Steve Thomas said at the time of the retrospective assessment: “I wanted to delay the closure of the Civic Centre as I thought it could serve a purpose. It could have seen us through to a time when we could have planned better.”

He said he had been told that the building was ‘past its sell-by date’.

Maintenance log

The evidence he had been shown was a maintenance log which noted the various problems with the Civic Centre.

Cllr Thomas said: “The advantage now is we would have had a council chamber. Due to legislation we have to have hybrid meetings, but we would have had a space large enough to take all councillors, officers and members of the public. It’s a shame that it’s gone.”

Cllr Julie Holt said: “The Civic Centre was a dinosaur and I’m glad it’s gone; our community hubs have changed things for our residents beyond compare. It’s an absolutely amazing service.”

Cllr Malcolm Day said the council would have needed a “formidable amount of money” to reduce the Civic Centre’s carbon footprint and the “right decision at the right time” was taken.

Deputy leader of the Independent group, Cllr Wayne Hodgins said: “There’s always lessons to be learned and we can learn from our mistakes. It was an unprecedented time and the switch to agile working was driven by the pandemic.”

Councillors accepted the retrospective impact assessment, together with a commitment to investigate an alternative venue for full council meetings.

But five years have now passed since the last face-to-face full council meeting and progress on getting a new council chamber is still pending.