17 FEBRUARY 1998

PROFESSOR DAVID CROUCH and MR GEOFF STOKES

  20.  If you were to take it that every time a tenancy in a borough became vacant part of the package that was handed to the new tenant was that there was availability of plots, then that would be a step in the right direction, would it not?

  (Professor Crouch)  Oh, yes.

  21.  And that is not being done just now?

  (Professor Crouch)  No. There are numerous very simple and very cheap methods that can be used to open these places up.

  22.  Mr Stokes, do you want to add anything?

  (Mr Stokes)  Thank you. There are one or two local authorities who are actively promoting allotments and they do hand out information packs to any prospective tenants, but there are also councils - and my own particular district council was doing an allotment survey in 1987 and it was said that there were many reasons for vacancies, some of them due to the A1, M1 link road and others due to low maintenance priority which was clearly to mean the council actually saying, we have got vacancies because we are not doing enough for these allotments. Now if we could get local authorities actually to take more consideration of promoting the allotments and letting the allotments rather than it is at the moment - pot shot if you happen to find the right person to speak to in the first place - then I feel that we could give the allotment movement the boost that it needs.

  23.  How practical is the flexible use that you propose in the national survey? I am talking here of making areas to open space. Is that a practical proposition?

  (Professor Crouch)  I do not see a difficulty in that.

It means negotiation. A lot of things that we are talking about require negotiation between plot holders and the owner, usually the local council, and the demise of appropriate sub-committees to consider that in the early eighties means that often the channels of communication have been closed, and it is very much to do with that kind of liaison, the relationship between the landowner and the plot holders and their respective societies, which can work out acceptable possibilities in this way, whether this is putting aside one plot, clearing a whole series of plots or whatever, the flexibility is the key thing.

  24.  Just on that point, Mr Chairman, I have got no wish to be a champion of the local authorities, Mr Stokes, but as I understand it local authorities have moved down the road considerably now and, indeed, it is local allotment associations that actually regulate the allotments, so surely this conflict has moved from the local authorities to the associations' own rules as to how they run them?

  (Mr Stokes)  No, Mr Chairman, it has not.

Allotments are still controlled by the local authorities.

There are very few areas where the allotments are completely devolved to an association. I think that Coventry is about the only real notable example where the allotments are actually solely administered by the association. In most other areas, however, there are still considerable controls in the lease agreements.

  25.  And do you think that this is the way that we ought to move?

  (Mr Stokes)  You mean into self management schemes?

  26.  Yes?

  (Mr Stokes)  Yes, the society certainly is promoting the concept of self management if only from the point of view of saving the council some of their administration costs by passing a lot of the administration to the allotment holders. The difficulty is that this should be a two way partnership and a number of local authorities appear to be trying to devolve management as a means of removing their responsibility from allotment administration, but that will never work. The local authority has still to maintain control of the allotments although the day to day administration can then be handed down to the association who are in most cases best placed. If there are any repairs needed or there are vacancies the actual society themselves are in a much better position to act a lot faster than the council, and there are a number of examples. In Torfaen in Wales there is a very good self management scheme where the council have two federations, one covering the north of the borough and one covering the south of the borough, and the federations run the allotments but in conjunction with the council. The council still has an officer responsible for allotments and they have sub-committee and the sub-committee then works out what needs to be done on the allotments and they can priorities maintenance or work. The allotment holders then make sure that the work is carried out by getting the necessary quotes and arranging for the work to be done and the council then pay the money for it. Therefore, there are some very good schemes that are working, but there are also schemes that are falling down, and this is usually through lack of proper communication in the first place actually to ascertain who is going to be responsible for what and under what circumstances.

  27.  Is that more successful, say, than neighbouring ones? You talked about Coventry and the whole power structure having been devolved to the actual association itself. Is that more successful?

  (Mr Stokes)  It seems to be running very successfully, yes.

  28.  But is it more successful than ones in the neighbourhood?

  (Mr Stokes)  I am not sure that I am in a position actually to answer that, Mr Chairman. All I know is that it is a scheme that has been running for a considerable number of years and it does work very well.

  29.  May I just move on now then to designation and the protection of sites as far as statutory protection exists for allotment sites, and can you give the Committee some indication as to whether or not you believe that to be adequate?

  (Mr Stokes)  My answer to that would have to be no, Mr Chairman. It cost us £25,000 to lose a court case which shows that statutory allotments have no protection at all. In terms of the judicial review case that we took against the secretary of state the court decided that providing that a piece of land could be gardened that was a sufficient replacement for a statutory allotment site. In that particular case the replacement land could never be statutory because it was town moor, so the effect of that is that if that site was disposed of we would have lost the protection completely of the statutory status of that site and a replacement then would not have been statutory. I would say, Mr Chairman, that I was faxed through yesterday in respect of the Rectory Road site, our judicial review case, by a member in respect of an article from the local paper up in Newcastle, and it would appear that despite losing the court case the council are proposing to drop their plans to remove that site, which makes us now wonder what can be done actually statutorily to protect that.

  30.  If I can just interrupt you, can you be specific about that particular site, please?

  (Mr Stokes)  Yes, I am sorry.

  31.  The council proposed moving - ?

  (Mr Stokes)  This is the Rectory Road allotment site up in Gosforth in Newcastle. The council made two applications to the secretary of state for the disposal of that site and they wanted to move the plot holders on to the town moor in Newcastle. We opposed that application on two occasions because the proposed replacement land was not statutory allotment land and could never be statutory allotment land and the Department of Environment guidelines were always that any replacement land for statutory must also be statutory so that it received the same statutory protection. On the first application the secretary of state rejected consent on that basis and on the second application he was mindful to give his consent to the disposal of that site. We challenged that through the courts and through the Court of Appeal, and both the High Court and the Court of Appeal decided that as the allotment holders were no worse off on the town moor and it was a piece of ground that they could garden and cultivate, then that was a suitable replacement. Therefore, the court decision now is basically that if you want to get rid of a statutory allotment site, then as long as you can replace the land, whether it is statutory or not it does not matter any more. We actually have councils who are quoting that High Court case as a reason to say, well, we have got a piece of land here, that is good enough, it does not have to be anything else. I should say that what actually happened is that presumably because of the challenges and the ten years that it has taken for this finally to be decided, the council according to this report are proposing to drop their plans to dispose of the allotment site. This has actually highlighted a particular problem because it was the inspector at the unitary development plan inquiry who stated that the site should remain as public open space, preferably for allotment use, so we effectively went to court to challenge a decision which was ultimately turned down by the secretary of state's own inspector. My feelings on this one, Mr Chairman, and a case in my own town where the same thing happened again, are that the secretary of state's consent ought to be dependent on the unitary development plan status of that site automatically having been changed. If the site is shown as allotments on the unitary development plan, it strikes me as being absolutely ridiculous for us to have to go to court to challenge the secretary of state's consent to dispose when even if he gives that consent to dispose the council still actually cannot dispose of that land.

  32.  This becomes confusing.

  (Mr Stokes)  It has taken me a long time to try to get to grips with it.

  33.  Could you just put this into perspective, Mr Stokes? As a society are you fighting one or two councils trying to move allotments per year or are you actually doing this on a much more frequent basis?

  (Mr Stokes)  We are doing it on a much more frequent basis, Mr Chairman. I notice that there have been a lot of reports in the newspaper on the number of section 8 applications that have been granted in the last 12 months, and that is only the thin end of the wedge. That is only the disposals that went before the secretary of state.

  34.  How many of those are there in the last 12 months?

  (Mr Stokes)  I could not at this precise moment say, Mr Chairman. In terms of the statutory allotment sites, I think that there are about 53. The ones that are not seen are where we actually get involved before it comes to that stage to point out to the council that they do have a statutory obligation to provide and to seek consent.

  35.  So that it is just not the case that when a site becomes derelict or surplus that there is manipulation? You are saying that where there is a highly successful allotment site there is this manipulation by the local authority?

  (Mr Stokes)  Yes. I highlighted in my case histories - and they were only brief because, as you will appreciate, it can get complicated, and if further information is needed on any of them, Mr Chairman, I am prepared to provide it. In the case in Deal I was alerted by the Department of the Environment that they actually thought that there was something that did not seem quite right with the background to the application. The council decided that one allotment site was going to be declared as surplus to requirements and they gave notice to quit to all of the tenants, and it was a fully occupied site with a waiting list of about ten people. They gave them all notice to quit in view of their decision that it was surplus to requirements and they moved everybody to different sites within their area. Three years later they applied for consent on the basis that the site was derelict and was no longer required. In passing the information to me we were lucky that the department realised that actually something did not seem quite right because we had information from allotment holders who were trying to get allotments in that area that there was a two and a half year waiting list for allotments.

Therefore, we challenged the application on the grounds that they could not declare the site surplus because they had a waiting list. Now it was very complicated in actually trying to get the consent rejected, but we succeeded eventually because the council stated that they declared the site surplus and they were not prepared to advise the people on the waiting list that there were vacancies on that site. The difficulty was, however, that the plot holders who had been on the site and the people who were on the waiting list did not always want to move. If the site is convenient for their own locality they prefer to stay or they particularly want to go on that site, and just to move somebody elsewhere up to three quarters of a mile away is often very off putting to people who perhaps have been gardening on the one particular site for 15, 20, 30 years.

  36.  Is it a similar situation then in parallel with sites that are not owned by local authorities? What statutory rights if any do they have?

  (Mr Stokes)  This, Mr Chairman, is where I think that our biggest difficulty is, with sites that are not statutory allotment sites. They are temporary sites, allotments that are on land owned by councils for other purposes and from private use. Certainly - and I know that we are dealing mainly with England - in Wales there is a higher percentage of allotments on private land and with the demand for housing and other uses a lot of the landowners are now wanting to dispose of the allotments for development. The difficulty is that in a number of cases there is no other alternative land available for allotment use. In one particular case that we are dealing with at the moment in Llanharan in Wales an inspector has already rejected the site for development because there is no other allotment land available. The developers wished to go ahead, but the council obtained compulsory purchase powers.

However, when they went to enforce those compulsory purchase powers the developer who owns the land has gone back to the council for a certificate for alternative development based on a hypothetical case that if they could get the unitary development plan changed and there was other land available for allotments, this land could now be used for X number of houses, and the value of land has now been increased from £40,000 to £160,000, which means that the council although they have a compulsory purchase order are not in a position to go ahead with the use of that land because the district valuer certainly would not allow them to purchase it at that sort of price. Now this is happening all over the country, Mr Chairman. A lot of private sites and temporary sites are actually under threat, and if one looks at our survey the last figures kept by the Department of the Environment in 1978 show that there is a higher proportion of statutory sites and private sites that have actually been lost as compared with the statutory sites.

  37.  A review is currently taking place about the relationship between central and local government.

What changes if any would you like to see in relation to allotments?

  (Mr Stokes)  It is a very difficult question to answer. Basically from the allotment movement point of view we would like legislation that is easily understood by all parties. Clearly because of our experience over a considerable number of years we still see a very strong tie-up in local authorities providing and government departments then acting as - I was going to say as an arbitration service, Mr Chairman, but I do not quite mean an arbitration service - acting in some way with default powers, of being in a position actually to say, well, no, you cannot do this, you have got to toe the line, this is the way that it should be done. There is a lot to be said for passing stuff down to local authorities, but local authorities' needs are so wide and vast that the allotments can in fact be in conflict with other departments in a council. Again in my own district council's area the allotments are managed by the commercial property development section, which strikes me as being a carte blanche that, "Look, we've got all this land, when we need some development we know where we can get hold of the land", and that in fact is what the section were looking at.

  38.  If, as you say, the local authorities' needs are wide and vast would that not mean that it has to be the local authority that takes the decision about land usage?

  (Mr Stokes)  In general terms, one would say yes, but I am afraid from an allotment point of view, no, I could not agree, because we have had so many cases where the local authorities are just not taking the duties or in fact are not aware of their duties. In another case I highlighted, Wyre Borough Council, they sold two statutory allotment sites to a housing association, and we have never had an explanation from them as to why they were doing that, because clearly the housing association's need is for housing and immediately the housing association got hold of the land they attempted to double the rents and also to seek planning consent to build bungalows on one of the allotment site car parks. Other councils see the land as a land bank for disposal, and it is only when we manage to point out their statutory obligations to provide that they actually realise that they have got to deal with it properly. I wish that we could leave it to local authorities who - you are right - should be best placed to deal with it, but in practice I feel that that would be very dangerous.

  39.  Is the question of allotments any different from any other issue? From what you have described there is a conflict in cases between use of land, let us say, for allotments and the use of land for housing development, which is the incident that you have described. Is that significantly different from other conflicts about land?

  (Professor Crouch)  In a sense the key issue is a clear procedure which takes into account meaningful evidence, and I feel that at the moment that procedure and that meaningful evidence are not in place. While some experiences of local councils make one chill to think of them having responsibility without adjustments of those procedures, it is so that in the last six months I believe that all 25 requests for disposal to the Department of the Environment were statutory sites were approved. What I think is needed, therefore, is a clearly visible and explicit widely understood set of procedures as to what one takes into account. That fact of number of vacant plots at the moment even may not be sufficient in itself because they may just conceal efforts to make them vacant over recent years. The existence of a consultation procedure and established allotment societies and consultation with them would seem to me to be a very important part of any procedure which can be visible and can be dealt with in a proper political manner at a local level.