Motion - Sustainable Tourism - A Sense of Place

Motion as voted upon

The Council has on a number of occasions, declared the importance of sustainability, and therefore notes and congratulates Bannau Brycheiniog National Park on adopting Bannau Brycheiniog as its official name, reflecting the importance of the Welsh language and the fragility of the language’s sustainability as a community language and through that, emulate this Council’s policy, one that was proposed and passed following a proposal from the Conservative group.



We also welcome the fact that so many enterprises in the tourism sector in South Powys have recently said that they would like to see bilingual operations in the Bannau Brycheiniog area. However, we note that not one of them has a Welsh section to their websites neither do they have plans to develop bilingual services. The Council already believes that the Welsh language belongs to everyone in our communities, and that our local Welsh names reflect the historical wealth, our heritage, our habitat and that it reflects our current sustainability priorities and lends a Sense of Place to the locality in question.



This Council declares:-

1. In view of this new enthusiasm in favour of bilingualism, we encourage the tourism sector to use native Welsh names for new commercial enterprises in order to maximise the principle of a Sense of Place, and thereby make the most of what makes the area in question so unique and special. Also that they make use of the free Welsh translation service, ‘Helo Blod’ available through the Welsh Government, in order to provide a bilingual service and image, and that they use Welsh food and drink produce.

2. We ask the Powys council tourism department and the partners in that sector, such as the Wales Tourism Alliance, Mid Wales Tourism and others to draw the attention of all tourism sector providers to the existence of the Helo Blod service and that they practise this as a matter of good practice.

3. We ask the planning department to adopt this principle when dealing with planning applications in this service area and to draw the attention of agents and applicants to the Helo Blod service.

4. We remind all tourism enterprises which receive public grants or a contract from Powys or the public sector, of the expectation that they acknowledge the Welsh language, and that they act in accordance with the Council’s Language standards.

5. We encourage citizens to use historical, current and new Welsh names on houses and buildings and stop the practice of getting rid of Welsh house names.