Aberystwyth revisited -"Technium" closes at Y Lanfa

Last week, working my passage across Cardigan Bay as crew on a small sailing boat, I got to spend a couple of days renewing fond acquaintance with the delightful, mid-Wales harbour and university town of Aberystwyth.

Albeit low-key, Aberystwyth harbour is a gem! Its a real working fishing port with maritime connections older than the town's prestigious colleges of learning. For today's leisure sailors, the  modest marina with refueling and overnight facilities for sea-borne visitors, make it a welcome stopover on any trip to the southern Irish Sea and beyond.

At the head of the harbour stands a massive new building. As a fashionably modern maritime museum or an art and culture showcase -or, best of all, a centre for oceanic studies it might just have been acceptable.

But its none of those things. Its excessive and pretentious -and currently empty. in a disgracefully short time it has fetched up as the cast-off of an ill-considered, over- ambitious, WAG-funded scheme.

Opened with a triumphant flourish in 2005 by Andrew Davies, during his time at the helm of our Assembly's ministry for "Enterprise" and "Innovation", the building at Y Lanfa Aberystwyth was designed to be one of a chain of Welsh  "Technium" centres that the powers-that-be of the day insisted were a prerequisite to the advancement of high-tech business in Wales. 

"The original concept that you would get high growth potential, high tech companies in there developing in their early years and then move on hasn't happened.”Andrew Davies AM Former Economic Development Minister

In Aberystwyth, the location and scale of the Technium building dominates the waterfront in a way that exudes insensitivity. It was set in its grandstand position at a time when the coffers of our Government in Wales were burgeoning with other people's money -and its servants and ministers, in awe of their own importance and power, were incessantly mouthing a mantra of institutional commitment to private businesses. 

The flawed premise of the "Technium" was that, with no cutting of corners, they would house all the skills and resources deemed essential to the incubation and growth of emergent hi-tech firms. Obviously, Welsh entrepreneurs thought otherwise. Prohibitive costs of participation and unhelpful attitudes of officials were not what embryonic Welsh businesses needed -and they stayed away in droves. Like too many recent high-minded WAG projects the Technium concept was not the product of consultation with people of practical experience. The ordinary folk of Wales are now paying a high price for political arrogance and institutional ineptitude.

The whole scheme, now recognised as a resounding failure, has been dramatically down-sized. The closure of the Y Lanfa Technium leaves an edifice that will dominate the waterfront at Aberystwyth for generations to come; a legacy of the profligate years and dissipated opportunities of a Welsh Assembly Government with Rhodri Morgan at the helm.

Already, the exterior of the empty complex of offices and meeting rooms is showing signs of crumbling neglect. Last week, there was a notice on the building indicating that a "change-of-use" had been applied for. It reveals that this, redundant WAG asset might soon be redeployed as a courthouse and detention centre. What a let-down for the good folk of Aberystwyth and Ceredigion! 

Six years after being lulled into accepting, that the modesty of their heritage waterfront needed to be sacrificed on the alter of "progress", the harbour might now be the setting for a facility that could have been more productively located on a neglected brown-field site elsewhere in town.   

Isn't this the shame of the twenty-first century in Our Lovely Land? Why is it that real progress in the intellectual and business skill-sets that might be advanced by a sound basic education for all, is frustrated by a government mindset far-removed from the gritty, realities of the needs of enterprise?

WAG must change and accept that it is never right to pour public money into causes in which they have little proven competence. Sustainable businesses -of whatever level of innovation or technology are founded on a work force with sound basic education and individual, often innate skill and effort -not institutional profligacy and glitz. 

I hope my many friends in the libraries and colleges and all the good folk of Aberystwyth take this opportunity to bring about a use for this building that might redeem its aesthetic intrusion by augmenting the town's undoubted cultural heritage.

As I slipped the lines which tied us to the heart of this Welsh centre of learning and culture and headed into the grey fug of a windy return to the land of the Gogs, I hoped that  those who now wield the power and influence in Our Lovely Land have seen the need for change...