Talk:Community (Wales)

What is the function of a community without a council?

As I understand it, communities are used for government statistics. Is this the only function of the communities that do not have a council? Can we find a source? Verbcatcher (talk) 03:15, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

The information in the Civil parishes in England must surely be pertinent for the period before Welsh devolution, for example it says (unsourced) "With the abolition of the Poor Law system in 1930 ...urban parishes had virtually no function". But on the other hand, the Wales Online article cited in Community (Wales) has a lot of useful info, particularly the explanation from the County clerk and monitoring officer who, for example, says "“A community is viewed as having a characteristic of a sense of identity that is often accompanied by a sense of separation from people living outside the area." The new communities in urban Cardiff were demanded by residents during a public consultation. Sionk (talk) 20:15, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

The quote from Marie Rosenthal in the Wales Online article says that communities are defined to reflect the sense of identity and distinctiveness of these areas. Do they exist to promote this sense of identity and distinctives (or perhaps to suppress it). I can see that they would help the local government administration by setting agreed definitions of areas. I am not campaigning to abolish them, but to get a description of their function and reason for existence in the article.

We say that a community forms the lower tier of local government, but Wards and electoral divisions of the United Kingdom says that communities are sometimes divided into wards. Doesn't that make wards the lowest tier? Verbcatcher (talk) 23:51, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

No, because there is no such thing as a ward council. Councillors are elected to represent wards, but they sit on the community council, where they may be outvoted by representatives of other wards. See also Template talk:Infobox UK place/Archive 17#Electoral ward. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:11, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

• I don't think it makes much difference either way, and I see both (as currently operated) as more anti-democratic than encouraging some hypothetical grass-roots influence (and I speak as an ex-community councillor)

The problem is that there's just no point in a community council. It controls very little, it has a minimal effective influence over even less. Their major effect has become to isolate communities from each other. Rather than sharing our issues with a larger (but still tiny) local town, our village found itself separate from them, sometimes pitched against them. The town has the only shops, the village has the useful station. Two adjoining villages shared much the same issues, but had their own community councils. The step between the county council (which controlled everything controlled by local government) and the communities was so great that the communities were ignored. There was certainly no sense that "the four local communities" had any grouping, such that they could influence the truly local issues - and this was the scale at which issues did arise. The population travelled freely between these villages and shared their services - but there was no body operating at that level.

My time as a community councillor was an utter waste. Given the turnover in councillors, I think I was not alone in thinking that. Andy Dingley (talk) 08:09, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Urban areas of cities

The article says this: "The communities in the urban areas of the cities of Cardiff, Swansea and Newport do not have community councils." How does one identify which these are? Each of three sources given list communities all of which seem to have councils. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:54, 5 September 2018 (UTC)