The first port of call for [taping] should normally be the regional councils ... However, in this case I _believe_ the Mynydd Llangatwg Cave Management Advisory Committee are the relevant access controlling body. Perhaps the multiple layers of separation between cave management and the BCA are hindering the BCA's good work funding conservation and access through the regional councils?
There's a bit of a misunderstanding in the above.
The MLCMAC until very recently was a government committee belonging to Natural Resources Wales who inherited it from Countryside Council for Wales who inherited it from the Nature Conservancy Council who inherited it from the Nature Conservancy. Each of these public bodies convened its meetings, chaired them, and generally paid the bills especially under the conservation and access heading. Cambrian Caving Council has paid for some things too over the years, and usually it would have reclaimed that from BCA (or NCA prior).
The mistake is to think MLCMAC was a caving body run by cavers for cavers to which the government were invited to send observers. Quite the opposite - until recently. It was a government body run by the government to manage cavers, and done ever so cordially. Cave access permits were issued on NRW letterhead although through a caver who acted as their permit administrator. Now that NRW is so cash strapped and understaffed, they've decided to rid themselves of their two cave management committees.
So MLCMAC has now become a private members club, so to speak, run by cavers who express an interest in joining it and contributing whatever skill and effort they can. The government has simply walked away, handed over its spare padlocks and cave keys to the cavers, nothing was documented, one final meeting in NRW's offices in Abergavenny with the usual Waitrose biscuits/coffees and that was that.
The OFD cave management committee has become a subcommittee of SWCC to all intents and purposes - perhaps it always was one except in the legal sense while the government convened and chaired its meetings and funded it. There is some paperwork to document this handover of control in the form of a memoradum of agreement made between NRW and SWCC.
As to fixed aids (which got a mention right at the start of this thread) it was the government that was on the liability hook until they walked off the job. Certainly as far as the MLCMAC territory is concerned, the official policy then was not to admit to having any fixed aids. Hence the prominent disclaimer notice at the entrance of Aggy that Old Ruminator should have passed and noted on his way to the scaff bars that he so strongly objects to.
MLCMAC didn't put them there. I don't know who did. But they've been there for many years and I think the reason involved an accident when someone fell into the lower passage below where the bars are now.
If people are anti-fixed aids, then there's plenty of scope: the 4 scaff poles in OFD1 which are there to spare visitors from getting water in their wellies, Lowe's Chain which is now a knotted rope, the chain on the Letterbox, the handline on the Divers Pitch, the Bolt Traverse wire, the Airy Fairy traverse wire, the cabled traverse into Waterfall series, the chain from the streamway up into the Bolt Traverse, the metal I-beam and then the rigid ladder at the end of the Bolt Traverse ... and that's only one cave!
I'm not singling out OFD1 here - all the major caves of South Wales have fixed installations which serve a variety of purposes including making access more efficient, practical and safe than it otherwise would be.