Edmund Richards, who worked for 40 years as a miner, shakes his head sadly as he gazes at one of the many disused coal tips at the head of the Rhondda Fawr valley in south Wales. “They’re on the move,” he says. “No doubt. From time to time, inspectors will come and have a look, and say all is fine, but everyone around here knows they are on the move, on the slide.”
It isn’t always easy to spot the tips in this craggy landscape decades after most of the mines closed. Often, they are cloaked in scrub and trees but Richards, 80, says everyone who lives nearby knows where they are and is worried about them. “They need to get on and sort them out once and for all,” adds Richards. “It’s only a matter of time before something terrible happens.”
The issue of what to do about Wales’s 2,500 disused coal tips is back on the political agenda after the Labour-led Welsh government published maps pinpointing 350 situated close to homes and communities that it fears could put people at risk in the event of a landslip.
Of those more hazardous ones, 79 are in Rhondda Cynon Taf, 59 in Merthyr Tydfil, and 51 in Caerphilly, all areas of south Wales where the impact of an industry that fired the Industrial Revolution are still clearly seen and felt.
It was a mammoth task to identify, record and categorise all the tips on a central database for the first time but an even tougher job seems to be persuading the UK government to help pay for the inspections and, ultimately, make them safe. Westminster insists coal-tip safety is a devolved matter and so it is up to the Welsh administration to fund any work that is needed.
Welsh Labour and Plaid politicians can hardly contain their anger. Julie James, the Welsh climate change minister, told the Guardian: “It’s ridiculous to say the devolved government that has been here for 20 years is responsible for the legacy of hundreds of years of mining that enriched the whole of the UK. It seems extraordinary that the legacy of UK mining should fall on the not-very-broad shoulders of the communities that hosted those mines.”
Residents of Rhondda appear to agree. Anthony Thomas, a retired civil servant whose home is close to one of the high-risk tips, said: “Mining benefited the whole of Britain. There was no such thing as a Welsh government back then, so the cost of putting things right should be shared.”
As a boy growing up in the village of Trehafod, Andrew Hedditch remembers playing on a tip that subsequently slipped. And everyone else here is haunted by the 1966 Aberfan disaster, in which 116 children and 28 adults were killed when a tip collapsed on to the village school. “A lot of people made a lot of money from Wales,” said Hedditch. “The UK government definitely should help.”
Beth Winter, the Labour MP for Cynon Valley, brought up the issue in the House of Commons at prime minster’s questions. Rishi Sunak replied simply that the Welsh government had the resources it needed.
Speaking afterwards, Winter said: “The Aberfan disaster casts a long shadow in the south Wales valleys. It is an outrage that people in our communities sit in their homes worrying every time it rains that the spoil behind their homes could slip and destroy their lives.
“The cost of remediation is estimated at around £50m a year for 10 to 15 years. To the Welsh government, that is enormous, but it is not a huge amount for a UK government. The cost of failing to act doesn’t bear thinking about.”
The Plaid Cymru Senedd member for South Wales East, Delyth Jewell, who speaks for the party on energy and the environment, said extreme weather caused by the climate emergency was making the tips more unstable.
She said: “Whilst the profits from this black gold overwhelmingly were shipped away from Wales, our communities were left with the dust that choked miners’ lungs, and the waste that littered the landscape. Responsibility for this clean-up should squarely rest on Westminster’s shoulders. This is far more than a safety issue: it is a matter of historical, social and climate justice.”
The UK government remains unmoved. A spokesperson said: “The management of coal tips in Wales is one of the Welsh government’s devolved responsibilities and one it is more than adequately funded to meet after receiving the largest annual settlement in the history of devolution at spending review 2021.”
