TUESDAY 24 FEBRUARY 1998

MR MARTIN STOTT and MR JOHN SMYTH

  164.  Gentlemen, can I welcome you to this session. Could I ask you to identify yourselves for the record and to give us a little bit of information about yourselves.

  (Mr Smyth)  My name is John Smyth. I am appearing on behalf of the South East Regional Allotments Committee. I am a retired local government officer. I have been an allotment holder for 40 years. I take part in the local society. I run a federation of allotments and I have been active in the region for about 15 years. I have also some experience at the national level and, in fact, I was the coordinator who designed and developed the survey which you are looking at and collected the data in.

  (Mr Stott)  I am Martin Stott. I live in Oxford. I am a plot holder. I am also one of the trustees, and have been for about nine years, of a church-based charity which has 14 acres of allotment land in Cowley in East Oxford. I am an organic gardener. I have written and taken photographs on the issue of allotments. I have to admit, perhaps somewhat shamefacedly in the context of the previous contribution from local authorities, that I used to be a member of the local authority and Chair of the Leisure Committee, but I was quite active in trying to promote allotments and bringing together leisure issues in what was then run by the Estates department which did not see it as a leisure issue at all in the 1980s.

  165.  Can you perhaps tell the Committee what the principal benefits are of allotments for plot holders and the wider public in general? How important is the role of allotments in promoting public health? Could you indicate to the Committee any initiatives you have taken yourselves in promoting healthy living in partnership with local health authorities or local authorities, any projects you have carried out in schools or with community groups?

  (Mr Smyth)  We did a survey in about 1993 and we asked some of those questions to a selection of plot holders on a national level and the clear message that came back is that the main reasons for people taking up allotment gardening were that they wanted an outdoor active recreation and they also wanted fresh food, and then there were a diminishing number of preferences like private space and things like that.

Those are the two central reasons for that. Also, we asked them their ages and we discovered that 65 per cent of allotment holders were over 50 years of age.

This is a group that as you go into the next century is going to increase numerically by at least 20 per cent.

It is also the group that are experiencing changing employment patterns, a lot of part-time work, early retirement, redundancies and so this group has a need to structure time because the traditional employment structuring of time has begun to break up. We feel that allotment gardening is an option that should remain open to them and it should be attractive to them. So that is an outline of why they do it. In terms of public health, there is the Health Education Council's campaign and in essence what it says to the over fifties is that if you are more active more often at a reasonable level of exertion then your risk of strokes, coronary heart disease and a whole series of other things is diminished and that has an immediate benefit on the costs of the Health Service. We would suggest that allotment gardening is one of those activities which is unstructured in the sense that there is no competition and this age group does not normally take part in competitive sports. The facility is available to them seven days a week, 365 days a year for the hours of daylight. They can choose how much or how little time they spend there and they can also decide on the level of exertion. They also have an opportunity to be part of the environment which is another aspect of allotment gardening which is high on the list.

Following on from that, if they grow vegetables there comes with that the healthier diet. The flip side of the public health interest is that we did a model of the frequency with which people go to allotments and on a 50 tenants site, which is a reasonably small site, taking the summer and winter variations, there are under 17,000 people who visit per year. In no way would any council propose a recreation facility these days which did not make provision for toilets in that kind of situation. I think that demonstrates that in terms of facilities the allotment sites have been the "Cinderella". It is difficult to make broad statements like that because there are councils who have made provision and made excellent provision and the task is to get the best spread more evenly over the others. The wider public interest is it is an open space, it is a natural habitat and in most cases it is in open ground.

My own site is surrounded by a golf course and people go walking and there are lots of people who come and go and so in terms of the public it is an open space in the middle of a built-up area which should be valued and preserved.

  166.  Are you actively involved in promoting yourselves and healthy living through the schools or community groups? Do you feel you have a role to play and you have advice to offer?

  (Mr Smyth)  As a region we took up the Health Education Council's campaign and we wrote to every health education officer in the South East area and we said, "We are an allotment movement. We would be happy to co-operate in any way that promoted gardening", which is one of their identified activities.

We made a number of suggestions to them, like having a little A5 notice in all doctors' surgeries and things like that. We did not have a response from one health education officer.

  167.  Not one?  (Mr Smyth)  Not one.

  168.  Do you see yourselves as having a role to play in schools in trying to promote the allotment movement to youngsters?

  (Mr Smyth)  It is a big topic but if I could just show you one thing. This is a photograph of the Sutton site where after some very active work in looking at the needs for those with special needs under the gardening provision they produced this as an early attempt and you can see that it has a variety of beds which can be raised or lowered as need be. It has a shelter and other things. The important thing about this is that while it was designed initially for people with special needs, it is more used by day centres and by disabled groups than it is by individuals with special needs. So there is absolutely no reason why a school could not have a narrow bed and use it in the spring, from February until July. Once you start on the windowsill with the seeds, you have the picking out, you can harvest a lot of produce between that and the time the schools end.

The last point I would like to make is that it is not tucked away separately, it is part of an existing site and there is a sunset/sunrise advantage here in that the older gardeners come and help and take on younger gardeners and in that way the whole thing is run as a success. Sutton is also arranging things for schools.

That was done about four or five years ago. We were involved in helping Runnymeade District Council to design a new site and there are a number of land deals which I will not go into, but they produced a site to our specification. They went to a lot of trouble to make the transfer easy, to advise gardeners not to take their old shacks but to build new ones and they gave them a lot of help in bringing the site into use. They had a little bit of cash available at the end so adjacent to their communal huts and their toilets they built raised beds and the raised beds are beginning to be an enormous attraction to people, not only the disabled but day centres and groups of people and it is quite conceivable that the schools could also be a part of that. You can see it is very suitable for a school because the children can stand around, they can potter.

Those are examples of ways in which spade cultivation can be extended to use the site in a different way. In my own area, Brighton, we have allocated part of an allotment site to the unemployed lunch kitchen. It is run by a group of unemployed for the unemployed and they decided that they wanted to grow their own produce. So the Council has given them an area of land and they grow their own produce for the kitchen, again an extension of the spade cultivation and they grow organically, which we feel is the way that things should go in the future so that tracks of allotment land are not left unused.

  169.  I found that extremely interesting.

  (Mr Stott)  In relation to public health, the Elder Stubbs site, which I am a trustee of, has had quite a pro-active policy over the last ten years of working with the health authority and with charitable groups such as an organisation called RESTORE which is involved in the rehabilitation of people recovering from mental illness. Dr Whitehead will be familiar with them because he and I met with the director six or seven years ago before he came an MP. Over 20 people who are recovering from mental illness are now working on a daily basis on one site. They have got four acres. This shows some of the new buildings that have been put up just in the last few months with funding from the National Lottery. Here are some of the workers having their lunch. The public health issues are taken very seriously. I am not going to repeat all the things that have been said by previous speakers. This is a piece out of The Times which says, "Patients dig their way back into the community". You have got all the connections between relaxation, stress relief, people who have been unemployed and in hospital being given some sort of sense of purpose and value and recognition in their lives, Prince Charles meeting them and all these kinds of things, which is really what it is about. As an allotment association, because we are completely independent and a charity, in a sense we plan the way we want to work. We see as a charity part of the process of charitable distribution of our assets ourselves working very closely with organisations of this kind. Chairman:  Thank you very much. Bill Olner?

  170.  Mr Smyth, you mentioned earlier a couple of the trends that will increase demand for allotments in the coming years, part-time workers and more early retirement. Are there any other strands or is that basically it?

  (Mr Smyth)  There is the health dimension as well and increasingly you see reference in the press to the recognition of the therapeutic value of gardening for youngsters with behavioural problems and things like that. That as a start is the way we must go. I would like to emphasise that up and down the country there are a number of local authorities doing interesting things and what we need to do is have a collecting point so that the best can be made available and the others then will imitate it. I showed you the sequence from the Sutton to the Runnymeade one. That is a trend and there is goodwill on the part of a large number of local authorities to do more with allotments but how? I think the gap there is the communication gap and letting them see what might be done and what can be done and looking at it in relation to their own area.

  171.  You do not see any difficulty in ensuring that the potential demand for allotments is converted into actual demand?

  (Mr Smyth)  I think that there is always a latent demand for allotments and I am optimistic that the need for allotments is going to increase over the next 30 years and not only that but that the substantial reduction that there has been in the provision of allotments from the last time it was measured is significant but somehow or other it has got to stop and there ought to be better safeguards and checks before any more land is lost and some councils will have to look at providing land that they have not provided in the past as allotments. I think the demand is there and there is a latent demand but it is getting to the latent demand and getting the latent demand on to sites and actively gardening.

  172.  Mr Stott mentioned earlier about a certain acreage for people who were being rehabilitated into the community. I think he mentioned four acres. Do you think the actual size of the site is that important in getting demand on there?

  (Mr Stott)  I think there is an issue, yes. My own view is that trends are quite positive. If you look over the last 20 or 30 years far more women are coming on to allotments. There is an area of contest, Mrs Dunwoody was picking up on this, as to whether children are welcome or not, and that is quite a big issue. I have got two primary school aged children and I am quite conscious of that because the site I am on in particular has made it quite a clear policy that that particular site will encourage children, with all the knock-on educational, anti-vandalism implications.

  173.  You also said, Mr Stott, that was not the case in the first plot and that is why you shifted.

  (Mr Stott)  Absolutely, that is the case. The problem with these trends is they are not all going in the same direction and it is difficult to know.

Allotments in that sense are an area of contest and there is a sense that people who have traditionally been on allotments and who feel uncomfortable about those changes are resisting them. I made the comment in my submission that not all allotments need to be the same.

You can have some which are child-free and some which are child-friendly. That is allowable and is not a problem. We have to diversify what we mean. The other thing about trends is that we have to get away from the idea of ten-pole plots. My experience is that a lot of people find it a real struggle to properly cultivate and tend a ten-pole plot and those societies or sites which allow people to split them up to five or two and a half are effectively the ones where the waiting lists double and you get much more conviviality on these sites.

  174.  In the first session my colleague, John Cummings, described very colourfully allotments in the North East. Do you think there should be a relaxation of some of the constraints put on allotments? Would it be more effective in promoting allotment demand?

  (Mr Stott)  I am not an expert on this but my perception of this is that there should be. The adjoining site to the one that I am a trustee of, there is a lot in Oxford, there are 32, has established a nature park with the urban wildlife group. We on our own site have got a big area supported by the Forestry Commission and English Nature. In fact, it won the Shell Better Britain award for England about four or five years ago because of the nature park dimension. It seems to me there is a huge potential. One of you commented in the last submission that a lot of allotments are seen as "strange sheds behind high hedges". Allotments do not have to be about that. In May the RESTORE group plus the Florence Park family centre, from across the road from where we are, are putting on a joint submission in Art Week in Oxford, which is a community arts project, and that will bring children in from schools, it will bring young families in from the family centre. In a sense you have to break down this feeling that allotments are strange sheds behind high hedges because if that is the feeling I am afraid that public support for them will always be restricted to a small group of people. That comes back to what Nicky Gavron was saying from the LGA earlier, can we justify spending this money on allotments when so few people use them? Answer: sure you can, make sure lots do.

  (Mr Smyth)  Could I make a comment on the first point that was made about the size of the allotment. I think there is a real problem here that is emerging and needs to be addressed and that is that more and more people are deciding they want to grow their own vegetables. My generation and lots of my members' generation know about growing and gardening and allotments, but the younger gardeners coming forward on to allotment sites do not have that background so that has to be addressed. I believe that smaller plot size is only one way of addressing the problem. There are other ways like councils instead of having one allotment per person should in fact ask their allotment holders Are you prepared to share? and there are many older gardeners who would love somebody to do some of the humping and lumping with them and in the same way pass on some of their expertise in growing. There is a major issue there. The size of the allotment is an important part of it but it is not the only problem there.

We did an analysis of those who took up allotments in Brighton. Brighton carried the Citizen's Charter on to the extent they produced standards and targets and the allotment officer had a target to increase lettings by ten per cent. When I looked at this at the end of the year I said to him, "How many were in those plots the following year?" And something like 95 per cent had left. We had a look at the reasons why they had left and the reasons why they had left were they did not have the experience, they misjudged time, the area was too big, by the time they had dug one end the other end was coming to meet them. There are some issues there and some work needs to be done on it and that work needs to be broadcast so that everybody is party to it and can act on it.

  175.  How do you translate the obvious success you have got in your site on to a more national basis so that allotments across the land can gain from what you have got as experience?

  (Mr Smyth)  To be very honest with you, I am flattered that you think our sites or experience is successful because that is the problem with people who do things that are worthwhile; they do not regard them as special; they do not regard them as successful. So there is a problem here in the gathering of information and the spreading of information and local government associations have a role to play here. They have journals and those journals could in fact carry more features about allotments and promote allotment practice a lot more than they do. One of the problems that local councils seem to have about allotments—and even the Department of the Environment accepts it as a recreation—it is not accepted by many as a recreation and any of the recreational funds that are available through CCPR are not made to voluntary groups on allotment sites because they are not a recreation. We ought to put that point to bed and we ought to recognise it as a recreation and put it on the statute book in those terms. That then would open a number of doors that might be helpful.

  176.  You cover more than just the one allotment site as an individual because you have got a regional responsibility?

  (Mr Smyth)  Yes.

  177.  What do you do as an organisation to promote what you do on one allotment site to others?

  (Mr Smyth)  We do a number of things. We work closely with the council and the council does, in fact, give us a grant each year to run our Federation, otherwise we would not be able to do it. One of the ways we do it is we have an annual newsletter which is a joint production of the council and ourselves. We put stuff in about the duties of allotment holders, about the use of water, about a number of issues. This year because we are a unitary authority the council has produced as a centre piece a map of all the sites in the borough because our earlier survey that I mentioned identified that the largest number of people responding to the question of How did you first begin to take on an allotment? say it was by knowing another allotment holder and that is the biggest potential you have and councils ought to be saying this to allotment holders.

Newsletters, the development with the police of things like Plotwatch which gives people a sense of community and helps a little bit with vandalism. It may not help in real terms but at least people feel they are doing something about it. The police are very active and one council in the North of England, Nottingham Constabulary with Ashfield District Council have actually produced a manual on how to set up Plotwatch and what the benefits are.

  178.  That lead me into the next question—

  (Mr Stott)  One of the things that we have done on Elder Stubbs over the last three or four years is have an annual festival in the summer over the weekend and it is nice because the plot holders can show off what they are doing and all the other things we have got.

What it has done is actually push some of that practice out. There are five or six other sites where schools have sites, there is an organic demonstration plot on another site, there is a wildlife area. The City Council is very supportive. They do not put a lot of money into this kind of thing but they do have the annual best kept allotment site competition and it is quite well publicised, people have their picture in the paper and there is a reception in the town hall. That gives a sense that people value it and that is one way of promoting good practice.

  179.  If I can turn to the question of vandalism. We have heard evidence from the LGA that if they increased the rent they could perhaps start a watch of the allotments. Do you think there is any merit in that?

  (Mr Smyth)  We discourage vigilante watch because if you have a group of allotment holders in their 80s and they meet a group of teenaged youngsters on the rampage— we say that the things you can do are to challenge people on the site, to mark your tools, not to put them in obvious places, to generally report everything to the police and get the police involved and that is the way we go. We tend to stamp on any suggestion that we are going to be a vigilante group because that way is discouraged by the police and it is not effective.