By Ted Peskett

Copyright walesonline

The night is closing in outside the Cardiff Bangladesh Centre as a father tells the hushed crowd inside about the times he’s had to weave past drug users lying on the street whilst taking his child to school . The man addressing his fellow residents is one of a number of people in Riverside that night who tell the gathered local councillors, council officials and police officers there about the problems they come up against time and again in their community. There is a pattern with some of the problems that are reeled off , sometimes in turn, sometimes all at once as the frustration of the situation the community finds itself in begins shows through. People told their own stories about “blatant and brazen” drug dealing, anti-social behaviour, random household items like fridge freezers left on pavements and black bin bags piling up. Never miss a Cardiff story and sign up to our newsletter here . As if those gathered to hear these concerns needed further proof that something needs to be done, a mouse could be seen running under a chair as one councillor tried to explain how they were trying to get a handle of the situation. Two themes above all else seem to stand out – ‘why is it us that has to put up with these issues when, just a short walk across the River Taff in the city centre or just up the road in Pontcanna, things seem so different?’ and ‘why are these problems allowed to repeat day after day seemingly without any consequences?’ One local councillor who was there to share his thoughts, Cllr Kanaya Singh, said the issue of drugs in his ward is “off the charts” and added that drug dealing and drug taking is happening on “nearly every corner of Riverside”. A resident recounted his own experience of having to walk down Coldstream Terrace where there is “regular drug use” and people “lying on the floor taking crack”. Others chip in with their own tales of windows being smashed and arguments and screaming taking place in the middle of the night. There’s also the impact that Cardiff ’s night life has on Riverside – an area of the city that people often pass through on their way home from an event or a night out. One woman said she caught a lady “pulling her pants down in my front garden”. Another resident said people urinating at the end of Mark Street is a “regular occurrence” at night. A police officer present at the public meeting, which took place on Tuesday September 16, said he completely appreciated the impact of the city centre on Riverside. PC Jack Long laid out the pressure that officers are under at the moment, with PCs who are usually out on the street being so “rushed off their feet” that it leaves little room for patrolling. However, he also noted the hundreds of millions of pounds allocated to forces across England and Wales by the UK Government in April 2025. The funding will allow 13,000 additional police officers, police and community support officers (PCSOs) and special constables to be placed in neighbourhood policing roles. Police officers being visible in the community doesn’t completely cut out problems like anti-social behaviour though, according to PC Long, who said most offenders are caught by plain clothes police officers. PC Long went on to say that another difficulty in tackling the problem of drugs in communities like Riverside is that as soon as one offender is dealt with, another takes their place. He added: “If I can make them think twice… that is my role.” There were 164 reports of anti-social behaviour in Riverside in the 12 months ending in June 2025, according to CrimeRate. The crime statistics website, which brings together figures on crime in communities across the UK using a combination of police data and data from freedom of information requests, also shows there were 135 reports of public order offences during the same period. Vehicle crime (105) and shoplifting (104) were the most reported offences in the 12 months leading up to June 2025 after that. CrimeRate shows there were 34 reports of drug offences. Ian Cutler, who organised the public meeting at Cardiff Bangladesh Centre with his wife Angela, said: “People just feel Riverside has been neglected. It’s just turning into a slum… the litter, the rubbish the fly-tipping, the antisocial behaviour.” Ian has lived in Riverside for 33 years and said the area was fine when his children were growing up. However, things have changed since then according to him. Speaking about the experience of one young parent in Riverside now, he added: “He’s got two really young kids and he has to navigate going past drug dealers… when he’s taking them to school . “I [don’t] accept that Riverside is just the same as other areas in Cardiff because the point is it’s just across the river from the city centre. “The top end of it is Castle Street and the bottom end of it is where the bus station used to be. “The railway station and the bus station, the main route between the two is up and down Fitzhamon Embankment and Coldstream Terrace, so of course we get affected. “That’s by all the crowds that come for events now, but the visitors coming to Cardiff, that’s their first impression of [the city] and it’s not a good one. “There’s weeds growing in the gutters and there’s just rubbish everywhere and then people just dump stuff.” There was an audible gasp when one council official told residents at the public meeting that thousands of reports of fly-tipping in Riverside have been made to the council since April 2025. Assistant director of street scene at Cardiff Council , Matt Wakelam, said more than 360 notices have been sent out to potential offenders and 71 fines have been issued. Mr Wakelam also went on to add that the council spends about £7.5m a year on cleaning the city and that most of this goes on areas in the ‘southern arc’, which includes wards like Riverside and Grangetown. The clearing of fly-tipped rubbish wasn’t the biggest issue for the people gathered at the Riverside community centre. As a number of people stood up to point out – the council does answer peoples’ requests to tidy up rubbish that’s been dumped on their street, but it isn’t long before it reappears. One man said he saw a number of mattresses dumped on De Burgh Street recently. It was reported and picked up, but not long after another mattress turned up. Cardiff Council ward member for Riverside, Cllr Kanaya Singh, said the council has “got to do something different [other] than picking up rubbish until the end of time”. Cllr Singh continued: “It’s not the council that’s fly-tipping and I actually think the council are pretty reactive. “That is not my problem. “Those streets are pretty staggering. “Whatever we are doing as a strategy isn’t working. There is a distinction between Pontcanna and Riverside. “We need to do something fundamentally different to address this.” One resident, Matt Strong, said after the meeting that he moved to Riverside about 18 months ago and called it a “brilliant place to live”. However, it wasn’t long before he noticed the area had its challenges. Matt added: “I think probably the mess has got a little bit worse over the last 18 months. “Drug dealing has definitely got worse as well, but what I will say is I think we can work together and we can work with local councillors, with the council, with the police to make it a better area.” Community skips and the introduction of CCTV were both ideas mentioned by residents as potential solutions to the problems affecting Riverside. A number of residents said they feel the threshold for justifying CCTV in parts of Riverside has been met. However, council officer Matt Wakelam said introducing cameras is not as straight forward as people think. Cardiff Council does use CCTV, but there are strict permetres around how it can use them. When the local authority does use cameras, especially in and around the city centre, this is mainly for crowd management and traffic management. The local authority only considers using CCTV if it’s already tried other ways to catch offenders, but hasn’t found enough evidence to take legal action. In order to install CCTV, the council also has to submit a formal application which includes things like a privacy impact assesment and records showing how many fly-tipping incidents happened in the area put forward. Mr Wakelam said community skips on streets would not be the answer to fly-tipping and waste issues either, adding: “What we wont have is a skip where you just throw all your black bags [in].” However, he did say a facility that people can use to dispose of small electrical items might work. He also said having the council attend certain hubs or community centres to collect items from residents was another potential solution that could be looked into. Councillors and officers at the Riverside public meeting also tried to reassure residents that initiatives to tackle the issue of waste are already taking place and that there are plans to bring new measures in soon. Cardiff Council’s cabinet member for waste, street scene and environment, Cllr Norma Mackie, said it already has street scene local action teams, also known as ‘blitz teams’, that carry out deep cleans at certain locations. There are also plans for the council to do more street cleaning in areas other than the city centre after major events. This wider street cleansing excercise is expected to take place for the first time after the Wales and Argentina rugby game at the Principality Stadium in November. Councillors and officers also said they are already noticing a big difference from Cardiff’s move from a mixed recycling system to a sack sort system. The new method of recycling, which requires residents to sort waste into different sacks and caddies is aimed at improving the quality of recyclable material produced in the city. Cardiff Council, like other local authorities in Wales, has also opted to reduce the number of times it collects black bin bags to once every two weeks. Councillors say this is all part of the local authority’s drive to improve it’s recycling performance. The recycling target set by the Welsh Government for 2025 is 70% of municipal waste. If council’s don’t meet these targets, they face multi-million pound fines. According to some residents at the public meeting though, the changes to waste collection are yet another part of the problem that greets them every day they walk the streets of Riverside. Despite all that’s being done, the overiding feeling in the Bangladesh Centre on that September night was that things are getting worse, or at least not getting better. As the meeting went on and the light outside diminished, people started to filter out gradually. Towards the end, one woman stood up to say: “The reason this room is full… [is because] this is a problem about this community that needs addressing. “[We] would just like to see this being done strategically.” In the endless pages of council documents on policy and the regular mentioning of initiatives that may or may not work, residents said it feels difficult to get a handle on what the pathway for helping them is. In Riverside, for now, it remains a waiting game for the community to see how and when the problems wracking their streets will be resolved.