The situation has come to head again recently following the Council’s failure to plan ahead for the festive period resulting in missed waste and recycling collections with bins and rubbish bags being left out in the streets for several days and litter and debris left to spill out on pavements and streets around the town.
Commenting on the problems, Dame Nia Griffith MP said:
“Unfortunately, the complete shambles that happened over the Christmas and New Year was not just an isolated example of how poorly Plaid Carmarthenshire Council are performing when it comes to collecting people’s rubbish on time and on keeping our streets clean and tidy.
I am regularly contacted by residents asking me to take up complaints about late waste collections and the poor state of our streets. They are getting tired with hearing the same old excuses time and again and feel that their concerns are being ignored.
Over the last couple of years, Carmarthenshire County Council have chosen to cut back on their street cleaning budget. In addition to less street cleaning, they have removed litter bins because they do not want to pay someone to empty them, which actually makes the problem much worse, or where they have kept them, they do not empty them often enough so they are overflowing.”
Dame Nia said she is also worried that the problems are only set to get worse as Plaid councillors had put forward proposals as part of its 2025/26 Budget to further cut frontline local cleansing services despite receiving an increase in support from Welsh Government for the forthcoming year of £14.7m and asking hard pressed local families to pay an average of up to £192 per year more in Council Tax next year.
She added:
“The Council is failing to deliver on basic services like street cleaning, waste collections, litter picking and litter bins provision and yet are now asking local taxpayers once more to effectively pay more for less.
Their lack of care for Llanelli gives a dreadful impression to people visiting the area. As they will be confirming their budget in the next few weeks, I can only stress how important it is to be able to take pride in our town, both for residents and visitors, and I am asking the Plaid Cymru Cabinet to really focus on these issues and get things right.”
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