Owners of motorhomes and campervans are ignoring the risk of a £50 fine for parking on a North Wales beach because they know they can get away with it, locals have claimed.
Residents in Morfa Bychan, near Porthmadog, have become increasingly frustrated at the amount of vehicles spending the night illegally on Black Rock Sands.
A Freedom of Information request has confirmed what has been long assumed. Since a night gate was put in place on the beach entry road in 2018, not one fine has been issued.
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Gwynedd Council took action to reduce the activities of overnight campers amid claims motorhome toilets were being emptied in the dunes, a Site of Special Scientific interest, with signs warning £50 fixed penalty notices would be imposed “as damages for trespass”.
According to the council, more than 150 vehicles were being parked on the beach overnight, posing a health and safety issue. Numbers have since fallen, however, on the August Bank Holiday Monday, 62 motorhomes and tents pitched up on the beach.
Helen Leeder, 43, a quality manager at Natural Resources Wales, said: “Some weekends there can be 40 or 50 campervans, motorhomes and tents on the beach,
"Surely they can’t all be taking a chance and hoping not to be fined? Six days out of seven I’m on the beach at 6am and some days it’s alarming to see just how many vehicles are parked up there.”
Although the beach gate is locked during the tourism season at 8pm, residents argue that vehicles remain in the area knowing they won’t be penalised. To discover if this was true, Helen fired off an FoI request to North Wales Police asking how many fines had been issued.
She received the following reply: “In terms of fixed penalty notices for remaining on the beach at Morfa Bychan overnight, we confirm that no fixed penalty notices have been issued. This area is not an area defined under an Order that permits the issuing of Fixed Penalty Notices.”
From 7pm each day, a vehicle drives along the three-mile beach asking people to leave every 15 minutes, and warning that the gate shuts at 8pm. People always appear to leave it too late.
“On busy days, the queues to get off the beach are lengthy and sometimes we still see visitors driving past our house at 9pm,” said Helen. “Presumably the young adults who shut the gate must wait until everyone gets off the beach. However some people deliberately stay behind and nothing ever gets done about it.
“If I was trying to run a campsite business I would be pretty annoyed knowing the council was letting campervans stay for free on the beach. There’s also the safety issue – how would emergency vehicles get to the beach at night if something happens to the campers and the gates are locked? There’s been lots of discussion about it on local online forums.”
Residents are also annoyed by vehicles queuing to buy their tickets to park on the beach. The entrance road has been coned off with no parking signs but it remains to be a traffic jam for motorists trying to enter or exit the beach.
“There’s nowhere else to park in Morfa Bychan,” said Helen. “On busy days the queues to get to the beach can stretch two miles. Having been caught out once, when it took me three hours to get back from Tesco, I now know to plan ahead when it’s likely to be busy.”
Gwynedd Council have been approached for a comment about its parking policies at the beach, and whether it has any plans to invest beach revenues in improved facilities. The local authority has secured funding for six French style ‘aires’ for motorhomes ("Aros-fan") within walking distance of town centres across the county.
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