Liberal Democrats · Issue 867

Simon Lucey speaks to Keith Clements of the Lib Dem Focus Team and asks what achievements they’ve completed this year in Cathays

The streets of Cathays have a real problem with litter. How will the Lib-Dems improve this?

We have already employed extra street cleaners to improve the situation, but we also want to focus on improving education.

I know when I was a student I found it easy to forget there are people in Cathays who are not students. Also we want to improve the problem of rubbish being left out for too long by increasing awareness of when it will be collected by putting signs on lampposts around Cathays.

What are the Lib-Dems going to do to help Cardiff students?

The Lib-Dems are more sympathetic to students’ needs, than any other party. We have a lot of young people involved, for example two of our councillors already elected have come out of Cardiff University quite recently and a lot of our candidates are previous students, so they can sympathise with students.

This is good because there is often tension between students and other residents over the previously mentioned rubbish issue. What we want to do is make sure that tension doesn’t boil over into making the council more anti-students and to start to discriminate against them.

For example, with parking, a lot of people want students to have inferior rights over parking as they are around for less of the year.

However, we think that you cannot discriminate against them and students and residents should have equal rights to parking, thus everyone’s parking should be inhibited equally.

Students are notoriously lazy. How are you going to encourage them to recycle?

That’s a good question. Possibly more education but as well as that we want to encourage them financially, as you have to pay for more bin bags if you produce un-recycled waste while in a Lib-Dem council (as opposed to a Labour one) you can get free recycling binliners thus encouraging people to recycle.

How do you plan to make Cardiff safer, especially the problem of vulnerable houses left empty over the summer months?

Ultimately there is a limited input the council can have; obviously they can’t suddenly encourage the budget of police and put many more police on the beat. Obviously we are concerned about that but there are only a few things we can do.

I wanted to find out more about the student wing of your party, what role do they play at moment?

Basically we recruit people that have come into Cardiff University into the local party to get them involved and then we help campaigning within the party.

This year has been quite an exciting year because we went to Huxtons for the leadership contest; we also had the Welsh Liberal-Democrat conference so quite a few of us went down for that. We also contribute to the debate on Lib-Dem policies, but our main role has been helping out with the Cardiff Council campaign this year.

So how often does the student wing meet and how can students who are interested get involved?

We don’t have regular formal meetings, but at the moment we converge on the constituency office on Woodville Road quite often, if anyone is interested in helping us out I would advise them to get in touch by email at liberaldems@hotmail.com.

How do the Lib-Dems plan to make Cardiff a greener city?

To start with we want to ensure Cathays is kept tidier. But we want to improve the party by looking at council buildings and staff and trying to improve their carbon foot print first.

Also, we pride ourselves on supporting public transport and obviously we don’t want to make things unduly difficult for motorists, but if people have a second thought to get the bus we want to encourage that as much as possible.

Also the changes on St. Mary’s Street have been quite a contentious issue, but we feel it is good to free space up for buses and make it safer for pedestrians.

So finally why do the Lib-Dems deserve to win the election?

I think basically we have the interest of all Cardiff residents at heart, including the students, more than other parties.

For example Labour have a lot of power in South Wales and I think it has made them quite complacent. For instance, before the Lib-Dems took control of the council in 2004 the Labour councillors gave themselves a pay rise that was later deemed illegal and unjustifiably high by an independent watchdog.

We, on the other hand, are not complacent as we have people’s interest at heart, as we don’t think we’ve got a right to govern, we are always thinking we’ve got this budget, what can we do with it to make life better for Cardiff residents, and if all that money can’t be put to good use we use it to make sure council tax stays down.

Nationwide, the Liberal-Democrat councils have had the lowest council tax increases compared to councils run by other parties and independents, so that is something we are particularly proud of and want to maintain.