- One direction - 16th July 2020
- What’s in a word? - 11th July 2020
- Time not on your side - 22nd June 2020
Here our columnist The Commentator looks at the problems in Wales today for people wanting to spend a penny.
Anyone trying to find a toilet in a Welsh town centre before Covid-19 would have known this was a hit and miss affair.
Mainly miss, with customers having to try craftily and nip into a café or a pub to relieve themselves.
But what the visit to a Public Convenience has now become is a matter of major public inconvenience.
Since the financial crash of the late 2000s Welsh local authorities, almost as a first cost-cutting measure have closed most, if not all, of their toilets.
Bridgend council, for instance, went from 16 to six toilets in 2018.
Blaenau Gwent closed all of its public toilets.
According to BBC figures, between 2013 and 17 more than 100 public toilets were shut by councils in Wales – the equivalent of one in five of all public toilets across the nation.
Since then even more toilets have shut their doors.
In fact, every Welsh council in the last decade has massively reduced the number of toilets it maintains.
This even includes the ‘pay as you go’ toilets in authorities such as Cardiff’s, which have disappeared almost overnight.
A few have remained because some councils have hived off their toilets to be run by community councils or local groups such as taxi drivers in Caerphilly, and Friends of the Local Park in Abertillery.
Most, however, have gone, despite often stubborn local opposition.
They have become just derelict shells, or with a ‘For Sale’ or the ironic ‘To (i) Let’ sign attached to their closed exterior.
In an attempt to save money, but still enable visitors to city and town centres make a required rest room stop, councils have paid local pubs and other venues to take the strain.
At the moment, however, the places required by law to provide the necessary facilities, such as those in museums, cinemas, fast food outlets, restaurants and cafes, are all closed – as are most Welsh local authorities’ few remaining toilets.
A dash into town can be literally that if a call of nature comes upon you.
Yet ‘toilet talk’ seems to be the one thing that politicians are avoiding at all costs, despite spending lavishly on many other aspects of Covid economic recovery.
So I make a plea to the politicians – remember if you want us to go back into the town and city centres as the lockdown decreases, make sure you provide us with somewhere else, when we need to go.
Otherwise Covid might not be the only reason we chose to stay at home.
And if politicians are seeking to create a world better than the one before Covid, can this one have sufficient toilets in it?
We don’t just want free Wi-Fi, we also need free Wee Wee..!
Tomorrow – the key word ‘witch-hunt’ which has been raised again after use in a huge controversy at a Welsh university where the Vice-Chancellor has been sacked and the police are investigating alleged bribery in a multi-million pound land deal.
Our Editor Phil Parry’s memories of his astonishing 36-year award-winning career in journalism as he was gripped by the incurable disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major new book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
If you need something to keep the children entertained during these uncertain times (in Welsh) try Ffwlbart Ffred about the amusing stories of Ffred and his pet.