There is an election on 6 May 2027. Bear that date in mind while reading what follows, because the council would rather you didn’t.
On Monday 21 September, RCT Cabinet will consider £800,000 for two new splash pads — one at Ynysangharad War Memorial Park in Pontypridd, one at Gelligaled Park in the Rhondda. Alongside it sits a wider package of £12 million in additional allocations for 2026/27. Aberdare Park’s splash pad is mentioned too, though not with a number attached: the Council says it will hold discussions with Friends of Aberdare Park about improving the existing facility and about its future operating model.
Discussions. In Pontypridd and the Rhondda, money. In Aberdare, a discussion.
How Aberdare got its water back
When RCT closed its paddling pools in 2014 on the grounds that there was no money, Aberdare Park’s 1950 pool was among them. It is the only pool in the Cynon Valley that never reopened. Abercynon and Lee Gardens came back because volunteers dragged them back. Ynysybwl never closed. Cwmaman’s site went under a school.
What replaced the Aberdare pool was built the hard way. Friends of Aberdare Park approached the Pen y Cymoedd Wind Farm Community Fund in 2018 with a plan for a splash pad. Pen y Cymoedd’s own account of the project records a grant to the group and a total project cost of over £300,000, with the Friends securing match funding and doing a great deal of fundraising themselves. The list of names that got Aquadare built is worth reading: Welsh Government, the Welsh Church Act fund, the Michael Sobell Welsh People’s Charitable Association, Davies Homes, WDL Homes, Davies Brothers, and £20,000 from Pennant Walters. Construction began in August 2020. It opened in 2021, in the middle of a pandemic.
The charity still runs it. Its most recent published accounts show total income of £34,607 for the year ending 31 December 2024. That is what keeps water running in Aberdare Park — grant applications, events, and the goodwill of four trustees and a pool of volunteers.
Now look south. Lido Ponty reopened in August 2015 after a £6.3 million restoration, funded through the Welsh Government, European money, the Heritage Lottery Fund, Cadw and Rhondda Cynon Taf council. Free swimming was offered at the opening, nine months before the 2016 Assembly elections. Pontypridd has a national lido, a heated one, run by the council. And it is now first in the queue for a splash pad as well.
Aberdare raised the money for its own. Pontypridd is being handed one.
The promise, and the photographs
Before anyone says Pontypridd simply looked after what it had, look at what happened to Pontypridd’s own paddling pool — the circular concrete pool in Ynysangharad Park, built in 1923, thirty-four metres across.
Labour’s 2012 manifesto commitment was explicit. If re-elected, the party said, it would work to secure funding to deliver a new lido facility and make it a regional tourism attraction — and, in the same breath, “we will also ensure that the existing paddling pool facility is protected.”
A community poll backed keeping that pool by 2,077 votes to 151.
In March 2014, a photographic record of the paddling pool was carried out on behalf of Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council. It is lodged with Coflein, the national monuments record. You commission a photographic record of a structure when you are about to lose it.
So the promise was made, the public voted 93 per cent to keep it, and the council sent photographers in. That is the value of a manifesto guarantee in this county borough, and it is the value residents of Aberdare should place on a promise of “discussions.”
Former glory
In July 2019, ITV Wales came to Aberdare Park to film the derelict pool. Reporter Hanna Thomas put it to the local councillor that the pool should be restored to its former glory. The councillor agreed, said we need to get cracking, and spoke about working with the friends’ groups to get it up and running, because our past matters to people of all ages.
That councillor was Ann Crimmings. She has represented Aberdare West and Llwydcoed since 2004. Since 29 April this year she has been Leader of Rhondda Cynon Taf Council and Cabinet Member for Finance.
The pool was not restored. It was cleared, and a splash pad was built on the site by a charity that had to fundraise for it.
Cllr Crimmings is a member of Friends of Aberdare Park. That is not a secret and it is not an accusation — the council published it in its own press release announcing her election as Leader, alongside her involvement in Cwmdare for Cwmdare, Aberdare Park Parkrun, the governors at Aberdare Park Primary and the Nos Galan committee. Nobody has hidden anything.
But she is now Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance, and the Cabinet she leads is about to decide how £12 million is carved up, including a proposal to discuss the future operating model of a facility run by a group she belongs to, in her own ward. Residents are entitled to see the declaration of interest recorded in the minutes of Monday’s meeting. That is not an attack on her character. It is the minimum the standards regime exists to provide.
The shape of the money
The £12 million package tells its own story. Highways and roads, £3.5 million. Llanharan Sustainable Transport Corridor, £3 million. Cynon Gateway North Transit Corridor, £3 million. Parks and green spaces, £500,000. Flood alleviation, £250,000. Unadopted roads and country parks, £150,000 each. Play areas, £100,000.
In fairness, the Cynon Gateway North money is Cynon Valley money, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But note what it is. Cynon gets a road corridor. Pontypridd and the Rhondda get the things families queue up for in August. And Cynon Valley is still waiting on the Aberdare bypass while council tax has gone up year after year on the argument that there is nothing in the pot.
There is evidently something in the pot. It is a question of where it is pointed.
Why now
This is the part that is opinion, and I will label it as such.
RCT has been Labour-run for a very long time, and Aberdare has been about as safe as a seat gets. Safe seats are cheap to hold. Pontypridd and the Rhondda are not looking nearly so comfortable in May 2027, with Plaid Cymru and Reform both circling. I do not believe it is a coincidence that £800,000 of splash pads has surfaced, eight months before polling day, in precisely the two places where Labour has most to lose — while the town that built its own with raffle tickets and wind farm money is offered a meeting.
I would be glad to be proved wrong. Cabinet meets on Monday 21 September. Prove me wrong: put a figure next to Aberdare Park.
Because the residents of Aberdare have already shown they will do it themselves if nobody helps. They should not have had to.
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