Welsh Cycling Industry Unites Against Welsh Trail Centre Closures

Over 90 separate Welsh cycling organisations have today co-signed a letter to Welsh Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Climate Change and Rural Affairs, Huw Irranca-Davies MS, concerning the NRW Proposal for Organisational Change and its impact on communities across Wales. (Irranca-Davies is Welsh Government’s Minister responsible for Natural Resources Wales).

The organisations and companies involved – everyone from governing body, Beicio Cymru (formerly Welsh Cycling), Cycling UK and the UK MTB Trail Alliance to small, local trail groups like Brechfa MTB and Risca Riders – have listed in the letter their concerns about the current state of NRW funding, its apparent inability to deal with volunteer groups to help itself in this and the Welsh cycling and holiday industry’s concerns about the future of ALL mountain bike trails in Welsh forests, whether sanctioned or not.

All this is pitched against the looming deadline of the NRW’s impending board meeting on September 25th, where much of the fate of trail centres like Coed y Brenin seem to hang in the balance.

You can download and read the full letter here:

Although there has already been a petition with over 13,000 signatures against the potential closure of Coed y Brenin and Nant yr Arian trail centres (enough to guarantee that it gets debated in the Welsh Assembly), the likes of the newly formed UK MTB Alliance are trying hard to get pressure on the decision-makers before NRW turns its back on the mountain bikers that use its forests daily, whether on sanctioned trails or not…

“It’s amazing to see how Wales’ mountain bike community have come together to voice their concerns about NRW’s cuts and the devastating effect they would have on riders, communities and businesses across Wales. Trails in Wales, and across the UK, face a crisis, with little to no money for ongoing maintenance or improvement. Volunteer groups are primed to help, but NRW and other public sector bodies need to radically simplify the way they work with volunteers to allow this to happen. We call on the Welsh Government to reconsider, and to implement our five asks.”

Robin Grant, Chair, UK MTB Trail Alliance

The ‘Five Asks‘

The letter has five requests that it wants the minister to consider before NRW’s board meeting in a couple of weeks. While you should read the whole letter, here are the requests in brief:

We call on the Welsh Government to direct NRW to:

1. Align actions and budgets with the Well-being of Future Generations Act, ensuring that decisions made today do not compromise the ability of future generations to enjoy the health and access to natural heritage benefits that mountain bike trails provide. There needs to be a sustainable, meaningful and ongoing investment into the maintenance and development of NRW’s existing mountain bike trails.

2. Just as importantly, ask NRW to radically change its approach to working with volunteer groups, cutting their internal red tape that’s blocking them from doing so currently, or if not, to look at different models to mitigate the liability risk of mountain bike trails on their land (we have some ideas to suggest here). If it can do this, there are volunteer groups standing by all over Wales (the UK MTB Trail Alliance has over 25 member groups in Wales), ready to not just help maintain and develop community-built trails but also those managed and run by NRW, which would obviously help compensate for the finite financial resources available for their maintenance and development.

3. Ensure no decision is taken to close visitor centres, even temporarily, while partners are found to run them, or if they are, then to ensure the tender and contract processes are expedited so the centres are closed only for a very short time. The finances of NRW need to be considered in the context of the wider impact on the economies of the local areas around the centres, and how it will impact the Welsh Government’s ambition to grow adventure tourism.

4. We also urge you to ensure NRW properly consider local community groups as candidate partners to take on the running of these centres, and to make allowances for the fact they will be newly formed and immature entities created in reaction to the potential closing of their local visitor centre. They should not be expected to meet the same criteria that NRW would expect of a normal commercial partner.

5. Improve access to the outdoors: The budgetary issues that NRW face, and the subsequent impacts on outdoor recreation opportunities, help shine a light on access issues in Wales. We ask that the Access Reform Programme be unfrozen, prioritised and included within the current Programme for Government. Access reform offers a unique opportunity to open up access and recreation opportunities all over Wales with comparatively little budgetary outlay, to at least partially compensate for the inevitably reduced NRW recreation offering and ensure future generations can access the unique landscapes of Wales. This could also be an opportunity to legislate for a reduced level of occupier liability on access land in Wales (perhaps modelled on how this works for the coastal margin in England), which, as well as making access reform a much easier sell to private landowners, would also almost entirely remove the liability risk the Welsh Government is exposed to on all of the access land it is the occupier of (including NRW land). If responsible right-to-roam laws can exist in Scotland, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and even Belarus, why not in Wales? Now is the time to change this.

So, what can we do, then?

The organisers of the letter seem confident that government processes will ensure that the letter gets seen and will hopefully result in a face-to-face meeting with the Minister ahead of the NRW board meeting. So, while now is not the time to get the pitchforks and online letter writing campaigns out, those times may come to pass if nothing comes of it.

What you can do, is consider donating to the (volunteer-run) UK MTB Trail Alliance as it looks like it’s going to have a lot of work ahead of it, regardless of which way the NRW meeting goes. If you’re a Welsh resident, it might be worth finding out how your local MP views the current situation and, nationally, the cycling world needs to be prepared to defend the cycling rights we currently have and enjoy as it no longer seems that we can rely on always having them.