TUESDAY 24 FEBRUARY 1998

MR MARTIN STOTT and MR JOHN SMYTH

  180.  How effective has that been in terms of reducing the level of vandalism?

  (Mr Smyth)  We do not evaluate it but it does tend to give people a feeling that they are doing something about it. If the vandals are on the rampage and determined to get in no amount of security or fencing will stop them. Allotments holders are now getting used to vandalism and they do rally round each other.

In my own experience it is declining in the Brighton area.

  181.  The vandalism is declining?

  (Mr Smyth)  The vandalism is declining. We do not see as many petty incidents. Perhaps they have taken all the tools out of the sheds and sold them at car boot sales but we do not seem to have as many shed break ins, that kind of thing. We talk to the police about it and we have a view that the amount of vandalism on allotment sites tends to increase with the level of unemployment locally. I do not know if that is valid or not but it does seem to follow that trend.

  (Mr Stott)  My quick comment on that would be to concur. I think that vandalism is in decline at the moment but also to say that you have to be fairly canny about what you do. I think that strong hedges, preferably made from holly or hawthorn would make a big difference and so does making sure that the gaps are filled with decent fencing and gates on entrances are properly locked at night. This sort of thing makes a huge huge difference. The other thing of course is it is much easier to get on to a big site and not be recognised. On a very big site you cannot see from one side to the other and a very big site may have a lot of tenants and they do not know who people are. I am an advocate of relatively small sites, say of 100 plots or less, because people know who is there and they look after each other.

  182.  Can we move to the protection of sites in terms of the statutory and temporary designations that have been given. Do you think that there is evidence that local authorities are abusing that provision?

  (Mr Smyth)   "Abuse" is a fairly strong word. From the plot holders' point of view and trying to get information about what is going on, there are real problems. The access to information is very poor. A Member on this side painted a scenario of a planned running down of sites, and I would leave that aside, but section 8 is a great comfort to allotment holders to think there is statutory protection and we would not wish to see that removed in any way. What we would like to see is a more easily useable system from an allotment holder's or group of allotment holders' point of view who do not have legal expertise and cannot afford it. Can I give you one minor example. To try and prove to an authority that says it is not an allotment site that it is an allotment site is a monumental task. Horsham in West Sussex has a new bypass, a new hard edge to the town and they wanted to move a site from the centre of the town out to the hard edge. Some of the older people knew that they had already moved it from the centre of the town to where it was. The council said it was not a statutory site. Two retired members of that society spent three weeks in the county archives going back to the previous urban district planning committees—because one of the reasons why councils are not able to say definitely what is statutory is that many of the sites have rolled through three or four successive councils and so records are not available and the council may in all honesty think it is not a statutory site—and at the end of the day we produced the council minute, praise be the minute clerk who wrote it because he wrote about the two parcels of land, one for allotments, one for housing, and how much they paid for each, and the Chairman of the Planning Committee who was about to address a public meeting on the development was told about this and he had to go out to the meeting and say no. You saw from the Blackpool people the anxiety and stress which this sort of process which takes a long time creates with allotment holders and I think allotment holders need a simpler system and a system that does not mean they have to produce resources it is well beyond their pocket to do so. On section 8, could I mention just one thing because I believe it is an important point. Mr Olner spent a lot of time asking about promotion of allotments but as you go round your constituencies if you try and remember the number of allotment sites where you saw a positive sign, they will be few. Bexley have put one of these (photograph of a sign)up on each site. It is a simple, very clear notice and the middle bit with the clock says vacant cultivatable allotments and then the dial shows how many and it gives you a telephone number to contact. I honestly believe in terms of promotion if that was more widely used a lot of people out walking their dogs or walking in public places and passing an allotment site would apply for one. This is a simple and fairly inexpensive way of doing it.

  183.  There does appear to be a bit of a contradiction in terms of what is happening with planning policy which I presume you regard as desirable, which is the whole question of developing industries more intensively and attempting to protect from land rural development. The immediate target for a number of local authorities is allotment land or might be allotment land. Do you see that at any stage as reasonable or do you think that allotments should simply be protected as an urban resource in perpetuity?

  (Mr Smyth)  The protection that allotment sites would benefit from is a series of screenings such that a council that wants to rationalise and has a case to rationalise should be able to go ahead with it. So the protection that is put in place, if anything is put in place, should not be an absolute protection but it should present a publication of what is intended early enough for the people concerned to do something about it. The latest Government policy on housing is of great concern to allotment holders in the South East because with the exception of the eastern end of our region on the Coast of Kent where there is a lot of industrial land and docks up for redevelopment, in places like Horsham which is a market town which has grown in the last 30 years on the back of office employment, there is no brownland for them to develop and there is concern—I had about four telephone calls over the weekend asking me what is the definition of "brown land" and if we have no brown land are allotments under threat? That is a real fear that will now be generated with a lot of allotmenteers who feel they have been neglected for a number of years, they have low expectations and they have the feeling that if the council had the opportunity they would get rid of the site.

  184.  So what you are implying to the Committee is that the extent to which plot holders have information about the designation of the site, what action is available to them, what their rights are is generally rather poor?

  (Mr Smyth)  It is poor and it is uneven in the sense that if a district council makes an application to the Secretary of State there is no way of checking out the statement, the waiting list is not a public document that can be looked at and you find out things by subterfuge.

Somebody says to us, "I am on the waiting list and I am number eight," and at the same time there are vacant plots. It is information like that that brings suspicion on councils. When the application goes to the Secretary of State and the Secretary of State judges it on the basis of the evidence in the submission, we ask the local threatened site to write to the Secretary of State and ask him to call in the planning application or whatever is involved and the Secretary of State writes back and says, "Thank you for your letter. It was interesting but the local council has an obligation"—and it gives the statutory reference to consult—"and if they have not consulted adequately then your remedy is in the High Court." That is a loop round that says to us we are not going to win.

  185.  Are you in favour, as we discussed with the previous witnesses, of some form of performance indicators, public notice as it were, of the extent to which a local authority is performing a duty of stewardship over its allotments?

  (Mr Smyth)  That always smacks to me about trying to get to the councils that are not doing it and I believe there are a lot of councils doing it. From the work on the survey that I did possibly the biggest problem that councils have is that they have not included allotments in any recreation strategies of any kind and allotment sites really ought to be part of the council's strategy for agenda 21, for land, for customer care, for equal opportunities and a variety of other policies already in existence. What needs to be done now is for allotments to be given some recognition in that and where the council has set up local agreements with an association to run its allotment sites, I have looked at many of these agreements and none of them ever incorporate into the agreement the relationship then between the tenant on the allotment site and the council in terms of equal opportunities, discrimination, customer care, or anything like that, so there is a lot of tidying up to be done.

  186.  Do you believe that greater self-management of allotment sites can reap great benefits to local authorities and plot holders? How do you move towards preventing any abuse of the system of self-management of the allotment?

  (Mr Smyth)  Our experience is that self-management is a great benefit to both the council and the plot holders. It gives them a feeling that they have got some control over their own destiny. They can do things that the council would find it very expensive to do and it reduces the cost to the council.

If you look at the profile of costs in a number of council allotment budgets you will find the central administration charge of collecting rents, of letting plots and of keeping the waiting list is high and self-management to the extent it does those things, under control from the council and by agreement, does in fact allow the council to use whatever money it has for allotments for maintenance which is the main complaint. It has got difficulties and I will leave it at that. It is a situation towards which councils can move and provided they set up sufficient checks and get the annual accounts and do a variety of checks like that and also retain some opportunity to say what the rent is going to be, at least a maxima, that seems to be the way many councils have gone and many councils have found that is a rewarding thing to do.

  (Mr Stott)  I think self-management is an excellent idea if it is locally based and if people can manage to do their self-management. Certainly I was not even aware that any councils, and this is an indication of my limited experience in that sense, managed waiting lists directly. My experience has always been that local associations and societies have done it. It clearly works well when that happens. There has got to be a relationship between the local authorities and self-managed units. The power should be devolved as low as possible. On Dr Whitehead's comment on building on allotment land and the whole business about brownfield and all those issues currently very much in the press, it seems to me there is a quid pro quo. I do not disagree with John Smyth here. Not all allotment sites are perfectly positioned and it seems to me there is a case for a very limited amount of building on allotment sites if there can be some sort of agreement with the local authority that these amounts of money raised from sales are used for promoting development and supporting the remaining allotments within their area. It has got to be a quid pro quo. I do not want to see a situation where local authorities conspire against allotment societies or a situation where allotment holders resist the idea that there will ever be any building on any patch of allotment at any time in the future.
Chairman:  We had better end the session. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your very interesting evidence.