A new body should be set up which has responsibility for the safety of all disused coal tips in Wales should be set up, a report commissioned in the wake of a coal tip slip in February 2020 has found.
Almost all of Wales' 2,500 coal tips are disused but 327 of the tips are in the higher-rated category. The Law Commission found in its review that the majority do not cause a hazard but "a few are likely to require more major work". The Welsh Government say the full list of where the high risk tips are cannot be made public as a high percentage of tips are located on private land, which means data protection issues stop their locations being made public. However their care is covered by a piece of law that is no longer effective.
In February 2020, heavy rain caused a coal tip slide, resulting in an estimated 60,000 tonnes of waste slipping down the Llanwonno hillside at Tylorstown in the Rhondda. No homes were destroyed or human lives lost but it did block the river, buried a watermain and broke a sewer. After that, the Welsh Government set up a coal tip safety programme which was intended to take stock of Wales’ legacy of coalmining tips and ensure that tips across Wales are managed safely and effectively. Since then people have spoken of their fear of living nearby, particularly in heavy rain. The Welsh Government has repeated asked the UK Government for extra money, some £600m, to deal with coal tips, the creation of which was before devolution, but the UK Government says it will not give extra because the Welsh Government is already given sufficient funding.
Read more: The location of Wales' coal tips broken down by council area
Urgent safety work included data gathering on all tips, including location, risk category and ownership type, and walkover inspections of all higher risk tips. The inspections identified the maintenance and remediation work needed, with recommended timescales for completion.
As part of its response to the Tylorstown emergency, the Welsh Government asked the Law Commission to undertake an independent review of the coal tip safety legislation and make recommendations for its reform. It has put forward 36 recommendations for improvement – including the creation of a new supervisory authority have responsibility for the safety of all tips. That report has been called a "significant milestone" by deputy climate change minister Lee Waters.
Among the recommendations are that the new body should set up a central tip register and that it should be an offence, punishable by a fine, to fail to notify the new authority, within a prescribed time limit, of the existence of a coal tip particulars of which are not included on the tip register.
