NRW has just sent us this revised version of their original statement:
We know our visitor centres are a much-loved resource among locals and visitors from further afield and the staff who operate them are rightly considered to be the face of NRW.
However, public funding is exceptionally tight across the whole of the UK. As such, we are having to look across all of our remit and critically review what we can and must continue do, what we stop, and what we slow or do differently to fulfil our Corporate Plan ambitions. This is no different to any other public sector body at the moment.
Over the coming months we’ll be drawing up options and recommendations for their future. We are currently talking to other public sector organisations, and others, about how we can deliver the visitor model differently. NRW is attending a public meeting at Ganllwyd Community Council on 1 February and will attend a similar one in Borth, date to be confirmed. The information provided at these forums, as well as correspondence received, will be used in our review and form part of our Board discussion in March.
Here’s the original article:
Coed-y-Brenin was the UK’s first purpose built trail centre, and paved the way for the growth of the mountain biking scene all over the UK. Now it seems the visitor centre there – and others across Wales – are under threat, as budgets are reviewed. However, looking into it creates more questions than answers – what is Natural Resources Wales (NRW) actually considering?
Reports that visitor centres across Wales were under review and threat of closure first surfaced in local press reports in December. Having talked to locals, it appears that the news filtered out via staff, rather than through a formal ‘We’re doing a review’ public announcement or consultation process. We’ve asked NRW to provide us with details of where the announcement was made, or the relevant board meeting where the review was initiated, but as yet we’ve had no answer and the NRW staffer we spoke to was unable to locate the information on their website. We do however have this statement from the press office:
Elsie Grace, Head of Sustainable Commercial Development for NRW, said:
“We know our visitor centres are a much-loved resource among locals and visitors from further afield and the staff who operate them are rightly considered to be the face of NRW.
However, public funding is exceptionally tight across the whole of the UK. As such, we are having to look across all of our remit and critically review what we can and must continue do, what we stop, and what we slow or do differently to fulfil our Corporate Plan ambitions. This is no different to any other public sector body at the moment.
Our visitor centres are part of this review, but no decision has yet been made on how they will operate in the future. Our review focuses on the offer at our visitor centre buildings and their curtilage – car parks, for example.
The National Nature Reserves and Forests around visitor centres are key sites for us. There is no question that we want to conserve and protect these sites so that nature can recover, and we are unequivocal that public access to these sites will be maintained. We will continue to carry out all statutory duties, and will consider the indirect effects of any recommendations.
Over the coming months we’ll be drawing up options and recommendations for their future, based on our evidence collated and also feedback from users such as yourself. The final decisions for 2024/25 will be made by our Board before the end of March.”
So, NRW has confirmed that a review is underway, but hasn’t told us where this was decided or announced. We have also asked repeatedly to be told how people can provide ‘feedback from users’ in order to inform their decision making process, but again, no response so far. Usually we’d expect these to be fairly simple questions to answer for any public body.
Frustrated and worried by the rumours, local residents and politicians in the Coed-y-Brenin have arranged a public meeting, at which they hope an NRW representative will be able to provide more clarity. One of the organisers told us they submitted an FOI request to NRW requesting financial information about the running costs and profits from the centres, but told us they were referred to the corporate accounts and informed no breakdown of profit/loss by visitor centre was available.
The residents hope that the meeting will allow them not only to find out what NRW is planning, but also to set out a vision for what they think the Coed-y-Brenin visitor centre and wider forest attractions should look like for the future. Many of these residents have invested heavily in providing accommodation for tourists attracted to the trails, and are worried that the closure of the centre will result in a drop in visitor numbers. We were told that there is a feeling among the community that NRW is the custodian of the land, but that it belongs to the community and the people of Wales, so NRW should be managing it in line with their interests and needs.
Ahead of any NRW Board decision, the community hopes this meeting will allow them discuss what they want Coed-y-Brenin to look like in future. Let’s hope this isn’t the end of the trail for this origin story. We’ll provide more information on what’s under review and how you can provide your views if or when we get it.
Well, back-of-a-stamp calculation says another £3 from each of the 100,000 annual visitors will cover that shortfall easily…
Right idea but that’s £3 contribution not income. So unless that’s all on the car park that’s not enough extra spend because there are costs of generating the £3 in most cases.
If everyone bought a £3 CYB mug (for example) you’d be losing (say) £2 of that to stock cost. You’d only be putting £100,000 extra contribution in. Really you need an extra £3 contribution/ gross profit from every visitor. That’s a slightly more challenging number because it almost certainly means incremental spending of £8-10 or more per visitor. That’s £40 for a family of four. No way I’d manage to spend that much extra a day. We usually end up buying a couple of rounds of coffee + snacks + pasties on a day there as it is.
Following the public meeting on Thursday at the Ganllwyd Village Hall I felt compelled to email the Welsh Government to voice my concerns about CyB’s future.
The NRW clearly aren’t the ones who should be running the centre, their representative on the evening admitted this and she also mentioned Forest Holidays as a potential organisation that could take over the CyB centre.
Forest Holidays took over the campsite at Beddgelert a few years ago and there is no longer a public parking at the site, it’s now a private site for their customers only.
There used to be public access to the cafe and shop on site as well,there isn’t any more…
They did build a public car park further up the road but it’s almost a kilometer down a very potholey forest road that is almost inaccessible in most cars. So people have stopped going there and now park further afield. ‘
If Forest Holidays are the NRW’s idea of who should run CyB we as the current users of the forest and centre could be similarly squeezed out over time.
I feel very strongly that the Welsh Government needs to invest in keeping CyB as a trail centre visitor attraction for the public use.
The trails need to be funded, the cycling ,running and walking trails. Money needs to be made available for maintenance of the existing trails and the development of new trails.
Some could say that I’m biased, well I guess I am, to me CyB is a special place that needs saving.
Ganllwyd Community Council are currently looking for a way ahead to keep the Centre open for all of us and they need public support.
If you also feel that CyB should be saved please write to the Welsh Government to voice your opinion. The more public interest they get, the more likely they are to discuss this issue in the Senedd which gives our local MP the chance to fight for us on a Governmental level.
Correspondence.Mark.Drakeford@gov.wales and cc Mabon.Ap.Gwynfor@senedd.cymru
This is what I sent…
Yn dilyn y cyfarfod cyhoeddus yn Ganllwyd neithiwr dwi’n galw ar y Senedd i gymeryd sylw.
Rwyf am sgwenu y gweddill yn saesneg am fy mod yn meddwl bod o’n bwysig iawn bod pawb yn deallt.
I think that the best place to start is right at the beginning.
In 1991 my husband Dafydd and myself started hiring mountain bikes in the Coed y Brenin Forest to individuals and groups of people from local outward bound centres.
There were two waymarked trails, a red route and a slightly shorter and technically easier yellow route. Both were waymarked by red and yellow dots sprayed onto the tree bark and were marked on a Forestry Commission map that also had some walking trails on it.
As more and more people came to use the forest trails and we all improved technically there was an increasing demand for longer and more technical trails.
During the next couple of years we along with the North Wales Mountain Bike Association members, both locals and from further afield developed, cleared and waymarked a trail that was also used to hold the NWMBA races at Coed y Brenin.
This trail would later on become the famous Red Bull trail.
This was the very low key,unfunded beginning of trail centres…
Due to the growing popularity of the centre as a mountain biking destination the Forestry Commission decided that they needed to employ a MTB Ranger to work on their behalf to look after the existing trails,build more trails and secure funding to enable the growth of what was obviously becoming a great success.
Coed y Brenin was the first trail centre in the world, paving the way for the many others that followed.
Mountain biking grew massively as a recreational activity and there are now well over 80 trail centres throughout the UK,all of them contributing hugely to the economy of the mainly rural areas that they are located in,with many local jobs and businesses dependent on the tourism they generate.
Wales, due to how accessible we are from large populations over the border in England has become an adventure destination within the UK with all the activity attractions available here and all the natural attractions, the mountains, the rivers, the sea indeed all the beautiful countryside.
According to the NRW they are running the centre at Coed y Brenin at a loss of 350k per year! How on earth can this be? And a building that is less than 20 years old according to the NRW needs a million pounds spending on it in the next few years in repair work.
They say that visitor numbers are dropping every year and that they can no longer afford to run the place.
This surely must be down to very bad management of a facility that has so much to offer in an area of the tourism industry that is currently growing in Wales.
Maybe the fall in visitor numbers is partly ,or even greatly, due to their gross underfunding of the trails at Coed y Brenin over the last few years. The trails after all is what all these people travel here for.
There have been no new trails built at Coed y Brenin for years, there isn’t even money available for the existing trails to have much, if any maintenance work done on them.
Unbelievably there are three singletracks on the old Red Bull trail now renamed the Tarw trail that have been closed for years after some trees came down on them in a storm. These singletracks have cost tens of thousands of pounds of public money to build and they are just left to rot under the fallen trees. Water damage and nature reclaiming them means that these trails are now all but lost as useable singletrack because the NRW apparently couldn’t clear the trees off them!
The NRW are Forestry Wales! if they can’t clear fallen trees, who can?
The NRW want to pass on the running of the centre at Coed y Brenin to someone else, they expect whoever takes it on to also take on the million pound spend on the repairs they say it needs.
Surely this puts taking on the opportunity of running the centre out of reach of any business or community group and means that only very large, wealthy organisations can even consider taking it on.
And without any plans in the future to maintain existing or build new trails where exactly is the business going to come from?
It beggars belief that this flagship centre, the template that started the whole trail centre development in the UK has been so badly managed and underfunded by a Welsh Government sponsored body.
Coed y Brenin is a huge asset to Wales, a shining example of how something groundbreaking can develop from nothing and bring wealth to an otherwise deprived area.
The current centre was built on the back of the success of the old centre on the opposite side of the road, a small unassuming tin shed that had a cafe, a bike shop, a shed for bike hire and a car park with some toilets.
It worked just fine, could have done with being bigger as the popularity of the place grew.
So huge amounts of public money was sourced to build a new centre.
The people in charge at the time wanted a fancy new centre that they could be proud of, money was not an issue,it was all EU funded. Sadly it seems they lost sight of what the building was going to be used for.
They ended up with a building that was unfit for purpose, there wasn’t even a bike shop or room for the bike hire.
A massive oversight you would think in a brand spanking new, very expensive building that had been built as a mountain biking visitor centre!
Due to this oversight ,subsequently another building had to be built, with yet more public money to house the bike hire and shop.
It seems that the bad management goes back a very long way…
If Coed y Brenin was in a country that valued it’s assets it would still be at the forefront of trail centre development, fully funded by it’s government and run by people that understand it’s value to both the local community and the industry that it serves.
Very useful information from Sian there and a good point about the finances and private ownership – quite how CyB can be losing £350k a year is a mystery to me.
It needs to stay in NRW’s ownership – selling is abandoning responsibility and not fixing past problems. This is no way to behave!
Really, all that is required are some updates to the trails, put the cafe out to tender. Raise prices a bit and diversify the activities on offer. It doesn’t have to make a profit.
Also, my example of £3 per head was not a business plan!!! It was an example of how a seemingly huge figure can be borne by a large number of people, spreading the burden.
Bear in mind NRW has an annual budget of £270m so the losses from CyB represent about 0.1% of that. They also manage several £bn in assets. So I have to agree ownership is best retained by NRW.
Unbelievably there are three singletracks on the old Red Bull trail now renamed the Tarw trail that have been closed for years after some trees came down on them in a storm.
This is unforgivable. We have two areas of officially sanctioned trails down here, run by volunteers. We have always managed to keep all of the trails open after every big storm, normally within a week or two. We don’t have the miles of trails that CyB has – we have enough for a couple of days of decent riding – but we also don’t have any budget or anybody employed to maintain the trails, it just gets done.
Watched a recent video on You Tube about the issues at CyB; It’s a venue for proper (call it old school) MTB riding, and a decent choice of trails, all of which require pedalling…..which in the UK seems to have become unfashionable.
Too many centres just cater for the ‘lazy ar5e’ riders, who spend all day sending it, and getting a lift to the top. And the MTB media are similar……all gravity/freeride with hardly proper MTB riding….
I came to Singletrack having decided there must be more to life than meetings. I like all bikes, but especially unusual ones.
More than bikes, I like what bikes do. I think that they link people and places; that cycling creates a connection between us and our environment; bikes create communities; deliver freedom; bring joy; and improve fitness. They're environmentally friendly and create friendly environments.
I try to write about all these things in the hope that others might discover the joy of bikes too.
