As previously mentioned here, Gwynedd Council claims that they are carrying out a public consultation about their plans for a bypass. This is a statutory requirement prior to making a planning application for a major project and for the first time all the relevant documents are available for inspection, but only on the internet.

The question is whether this is a consultation at all. To begin with, Gwynedd Council refer to their project as the ‘A496 Llanbedr Access Improvement Scheme’, which does not describe the proposal accurately. The plan is, and always has been, to build a bypass. Far from improving access to Llanbedr with all that it has to offer, this will divert traffic away from the village. It cannot possibly be described as improving access to Llanbedr, and how can you claim that you are undertaking a consultation when you don’t even describe what you are doing properly?

But that’s not all. Surely for a consultation to be anything more than a sham, you have to make sure that the people who will be affected by the proposed scheme know that there is a consultation taking place, so that they can make any representations they wish? In this case that would be every one who lives in the Llanbedr Community Council area as a bare minimum.

So it seems very strange that the only publicity that has been given to this so called consultation is two sets of A4 posters on telegraph poles near the 30 mph limits at either end of the village, where no one walks and they are impossible to read from a moving car, and a pair on another telegraph pole outside the Vic, which anyone who is looking at the village notice board, where you would expect to find such notices, will have their back to and will be unlikely to notice. There is nothing on the village notice board and there was nothing in the last edition of the Cambrian News.

If anyone knows of any other attempt to publicise this consultation, it would be very good to hear about it through the comments. It would also be very interesting to know whether Llanbedr Community Council has intervened to ensure that this consultation, which is a statutory obligation, is conducted properly.