The regeneration of Swansea and the cost of living are the two biggest issues for people who responded to a survey. They dominated a poll by Wales Online about what mattered to voters most ahead of the council elections on May 5.
Readers were asked what they felt the biggest issue was in Swansea, and were given the choice of council tax, cost of living, education, local transport, fly-tipping, regeneration, rubbish collection, climate change, housing, social services or "other". A total of 33% of respondents said regeneration, 32% said cost of living, 21% said "other", and 12% said council tax. Housing and local transport picked up the remainder.
The survey also asked people if they felt the £1.3 billion city deal for the Swansea Bay City Region was working for Swansea. Almost exactly half said they thought it was, 29% said it wasn't, and 20% were unsure. You can read more stories about Swansea here.
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Like most cities and towns, bricks and mortar retail in Swansea was facing increasingly stiff competition from online retail before Covid lockdowns hit in March 2020 and beyond. The highest profile casualty has been the Quadrant Shopping Centre Debenhams store, which closed early last year.
Hospitality and leisure businesses were also hugely impacted by lockdowns, and even as measures eased footfall remained lower than normal because many office workers continued to work from home. These were national, global pandemic problems.
Work did plough on though with the £135 million Copr Bay scheme featuring the new indoor arena and coastal park and, on the other side of Oystermouth Road, a multi-storey car park, flats and ground floor commercial units. This is a council-led project, and the hope of those seeing it through is that will boost confidence and encourage private sector money to flow into the city centre as well as providing an attraction in its own right.
A second phase of Copr Bay, featuring a public sector office hub, flats and commercial space is planned next. Swansea has a raft of other development projects either under way or in the pipeline, and large student accommodation blocks continue to take shape. The leisure and hospitality sector would seem to be in a good position for recovery, given that people's movements and social life have been restricted for so long, and independent shops could benefit from the decline of high street brands.
A report commissioned by the council last year about the retail and leisure offer and overall look of Swansea had positive and negative findings. Swansea's coastal and hill-fringed setting, it said, was unique, and efforts were clearly under way to improve the city. But it added there was still a poor perception of the city centre, and a sense of pride and ownership needed to be instilled.
The report, by consultants BDP and Rivington Hark, summed up the dilemma: "The reality is there is now a rapid contraction of the retail offer in the city. This is happening faster than the speed with which the interventions are coming out of the ground."
The report was written when Covid cast more of a shadow than it does now - pubs and restaurants are busier, and the need to diversify a city's offering seems to be taken as read these days. But inflation and the cost of living crisis - fuelled by soaring energy prices - is dominating people's lives, and non-essential purchases like meals out tend to be the first items struck off household budgets.
Again these are national and global predicaments, largely outside a council's gift. Local authorities have been given some funding by the Welsh Government to help those affected most by rising prices, and Swansea Council has decided to give a £28 rebate to all Band A and Band B council taxpayers. Some other support measures were announced.
The council is also a partner in the Swansea Bay city deal - a private-public partnership aimed at creating jobs and boosting the economy through nine projects in Swansea, Neath Port Talbot, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. It is a complex set-up and private sector funding as well as job creation seems key to its long-term success. After a slow start, the projects have now all been signed off.
Meanwhile, 90% of the respondents to the Wales Online survey said they would vote in the elections, 7% were unsure and 3% said they wouldn't. Turnouts at council elections are traditionally low.
In 2017, a turnout exceeding 50% was only recorded in two of Wales's 22 council areas - Ceredigion and Gwnyedd. The figure for Swansea was 38.1%, although it was a little higher than in 2012. The lowest turnouts were in Caerphilly and Newport, where 36.3% of the electorate voted. The turnout tomorrow in Swansea and everywhere else is in your hands.
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