WORK to upgrade Powys County Council’s (PCC) Chamber at Llandrindod Wells meant that the cabinet meeting held on Tuesday, January 7, was not available to watch online.

Usually cabinet and full council meetings held by PCC at county hall can be seen in person, or online in a webcast.

After the meeting has finished the webcast is archived and available to be watched again in a day or two.

Cabinet meetings are also usually held in the Council Chamber, but on this occasion the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, January 7 was held in Committee Room A.

This is because in recent months, the meetings have been plagued by technical difficulties.

It is hoped that  the work being done at the chamber all this week will improve the situation by the next cabinet meeting scheduled for January 21.

The next full council meeting is also scheduled to take place in the same week, on January 23.

At the cabinet meeting, head of legal and democratic services, Clive Pinney, said: “Can I apologise to members for lack of webcasting today.

“As you will see when you pass the chamber there’s cables and everything going on. They are doing the work and that’s why we’re here.”

Council Leader, Cllr Rosemarie Harris (Independent – Llangynidr), said: “We all understand there have been lots of problems with the system in recent times.

“We have just got the one item on our agenda which has come up from a (full) council agenda before and it’s also been before us (cabinet) before, so it’s not new territory to us.”

The one item on the agenda was to go ahead with the process of merging Ladywell Infants and Hafren Junior schools in Newtown

The process will see the decision come back in front of cabinet in a couple of months time to discuss any objections against the decision.

In 2019 complaints were made about the need for more and better Welsh language translation at meetings and for webcast.

It had been expected that more meetings would be available to view online.