WEDNESDAY 25 MARCH 1998

ANGELA EAGLE, MP and MR JOHN ROBERTS

  220.  Is it bad or good?

  (Angela Eagle)  It is a representation of how society has changed. Food is more readily available from supermarkets these days. People have other leisure pursuits as well.

  221.  I am not asking the reasons for the decline.

We know there is a decline. We know the figures. My question is this: does the Government believe that the decline in the number of allotments, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Not why it has happened.

  (Angela Eagle)  I do not think we would want to be trying somehow to make people garden in allotments. It is a reflection of what people are currently wanting to do with other leisure pursuits and buying their food elsewhere. I said at the beginning of the evidence session that we think allotment gardening is a good idea, but we are not making it compulsory.

  222.  So rather like the answer to Mr Cummings, the Government has no plans to change that decline? You have no initiatives you are going to take, in order to stop or prevent the decline in the use of allotments?

  (Angela Eagle)  In essence, if individuals want to use allotments, there is very powerful legislative protection already on the statute book.

  223.  You rather eluded Mr Cummings's question, as you have mine. Does the Government have any plans to promote the use of allotments? Do you regret the decline in allotments? Not why there is protection for them. Not why this has happened. Does the Government believe that allotments are a good thing? Also, does the Government intend to take action to promote their use?

  (Angela Eagle)  I said at the beginning that allotments were a good thing, in the statement I read out. They have the benefits I mentioned earlier. We believe it is for local authorities to promote allotments at local level. It is a very local issue.

  224.  You see, the worry we have is that when you are under pressure for new housing land and for brown land in the inner-city areas, your answer that there are lots of vacancies and that the Government has no particular plans to promote allotments, your general laissez faire approach to allotments might lead to pressure for house building on allotments. Indeed, in the list of sales since 1 May there has been a very substantial amount of new building of houses on allotments. Does the Government believe that to be inevitable, good or bad?

  (Angela Eagle)  No. There is section 8 protection which says that any disposal of allotments has to be approved by the Secretary of State. If you have a look at the 47 that have come before the Secretary of State since May of last year, you will see that there is a wide range of alternative uses to which they have been put.

  225.  Indeed. Corby Sheltered Housing, Wimpey's car park, Sutton is the supermarket.

  (Angela Eagle)  12 of the 47, if you look at the figures, Mr Gray, have actually involved sheltered housing, housing, those kinds of developments. The rest are all leisure. It is wrong to say that the allotments, which have been lost since last May, have all gone to house building.

  226.  So the Government are therefore committed to preserving allotments, if they are vacant, as you correctly said, in making sure that they are not simply taken over for lots of housing, but are committed to using that land for these environmentally helpful projects.

  (Angela Eagle)  There are section 8 protections, which are available to ensure that the Secretary of State can check when applications are made to dispose of allotment land, to ensure that it has not been wrongly disposed of. Those protections are still in legislation. We think they are providing useful extra checks to ensure that there is not that kind of erosion. What I would also want to say is that we have had a look at—— We know there has been a worry in this Committee that local authorities somehow are the judge and jury, and they may well benefit because if some allotment land is taken they can sell the land. In all of the 47 occasions that we have had since May last year, what happens in section 8 is that we look at whether there are vacancies. This is done in Government offices, by the way. We look at whether there are vacancies and a list of people waiting. What I wanted to say today was that we are going to ensure in future, as part of the section 8 procedures, that local authorities have actually actively promoted their allotments; so that we can get round the idea that local authorities may deliberately be allowing land to get derelict so that they can then dispose of it. Therefore, one of the new criteria is that we will ask Government offices to look, when they are looking at applications for disposal, at whether there has been an active promotion of the allotments. We hope this will get round any fears that local authorities may be acting as judge and jury and not actively promoting allotments. This is a new thing which we hope will get round any worries about the section 8 process.

Chairman:  I think that is very helpful.

  227.  It is an excellent idea as long as you monitor it. I am assuming that you will.

  (Angela Eagle)  It will be monitored, Mrs Dunwoody, through the Government offices. When they get a section 8 application, they will begin to look at things like: are there waiting lists? Are there people waiting to have allotments? That is part of the process which goes on. We will be asking Government offices also to check that local authorities have been actively promoting their allotments.

  228.  That is very helpful, particularly if it is checked, although I suspect that you will convince the Committee rather more when we see one or two refusals.

  (Angela Eagle)  May I say on the refusal point, if you look at the list of 47, you will see that there have been no objections. It is very difficult to refuse an application. The process involves looking for objectors. If you look at the list, you will see that in the vast majority of cases there were no existing allotment gardeners affected; or, if they were, they were happy to be moved, either to a plot on the same site or to a different site. It is very difficult for the Government office reasonably to turn down an application to dispose of allotment land if nobody is objecting to that fact.

  229.  On the figures in your submission to us, in your letter of 16 March when you listed 47, there are some pending. Certainly there is going to be building of some description or of car parking facilities in some 23 of those and one is built, which is half the total, and which is going to be used for some form of building, car parking or commercial use. There are also two that are going to be taken for cemeteries, so this is a lot more than the figure you gave us.

  (Angela Eagle)  My figure was that, but it included things like garden sports, playgrounds, millennium green, recreational use. Understandably and obviously in some instances, we have only one word summing up what is going on in these plots; so it is difficult, without getting more information, to see it exactly. Yes, there is housing and car-parking in some instances, that is absolutely true.

  230.  You mentioned that there was strong protection for sites in law. Also, you also stated that those laws were somewhat antediluvian. One of the interesting aspects of evidence we have received is that there is some suggestion that local authorities do not quite understand the terms "statutory" and "temporary" and appear to apply them, on occasions, in a rather strange way. Do you have any evidence of that, or do you have any reports on that matter?

  (Angela Eagle)  You are quite right, Mr Whitehead, that the law is very antiquated. It is spread across the statutes. It dates initially from the old Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries. The vast body of allotment law is from the early part of this century, and then supplemented to the end of the Second World War. It is very old land. It does give extraordinary protections to allotments, of the sort you would not expect to see if legislation was passed these days; such as the duty of local authorities to provide allotments if six people on the electoral register say they want one. So there are some very strong protections.

  231.  Could you give us an example where that has happened.

  (Angela Eagle)  This is all done at local level. I have not heard of any new creation of allotments. I have heard of allotments being moved from one particular area to another. If you see the vacancy rates in most places there is not an endless supply of allotment land, except possibly in Mr Cummings's area. But if people were to approach local authorities, there is a statutory duty for provision to be made. It is a stronger support that you get for any other leisure activity that I can think of.

  232.  What I wanted to try and fix down is that whilst I accept that is true, it does appear that a number of authorities, for example, are designating land as temporary when really it ought to be statutory. This is because the local authority does not have a reasonable use for the land in the foreseeable future. They are, therefore, reserving the right for themselves to get rid of the site without the protection that the law, as you say, affords.

  (Angela Eagle)  The idea of temporary allotments was really created so that land could be put to use. They are often next to cemeteries. If you look at a couple of the disposals we have been talking about, they have gone to use as cemeteries. It is quite often that where you get overspill areas, where cemeteries are clearly going to require space in the future, that this is given over to allotment land as temporary allotments. You can see why that is a good idea, but also why you would want to get the land back when the time came. Clearly under the statutory legislation, statutory allotment land has a lot more protection than temporary. It may be that in some areas local authorities are choosing not to designate this as statutory land, so that they can be more flexible about using it. The law, as it is currently written, allows that. I would be reluctant to get rid of the temporary designation of allotment land, simply because this might mean that some land which could be cultivated for 30 or 40 years, is just withdrawn from allotment use altogether.

  233.  Would you be in favour, say, of a system, where if a plot of land were in continuous cultivation for allotment purposes, for perhaps 25 years, it would then achieve by custom and practice automatic statutory use? I would have thought that a local authority should decide what it is going to do in 25 years.

  (Angela Eagle)  In some instances that might be okay. For others, cemeteries for instance, it may not. The danger with being rigid about it is that you just persuade local authorities to withdraw, what would have been temporary allotment land, completely from cultivation.

  234.  If a local authority reapplied to you for an extension maybe. I am worried that there does seem to be a lacuna in the law which certainly, in some of our evidence, suggests that is what some local authorities are driving to.

  (Angela Eagle)  It all depends on why the land has been designated as temporary allotment land in the first place. If there is no obvious future use for it, then you have a point. If it is next to a cemetery, for example, which happens quite regularly, it is more problematic. These things are best resolved at local level by a good relationship between the people who are cultivating allotments and the local authority. We have no direct evidence. People have not contacted us in great numbers and said that there is lots of allotment land being falsely designated as temporary.

  235.  Would you be prepared to write to local authorities at some stage to remind them of the distinction?

  (Angela Eagle)  I do not see why we cannot issue guidance on that. However, we do not have any massive evidence that it is a problem.

  236.  On that very point, the idea of promotion— not so much marketing but promotion—there does not seem to be the focus of attention that there might otherwise be, to the situation of developing and improving upon the allotment culture. Gardening, in the last ten years, has gone through the roof as far as an activity is concerned. It follows that in a number of cases, you are going to have people who would want to have some land to be able to garden on. There is not that effort which requires to be made in terms of the health of the nation. This is not something I would necessarily believe should be left to the local authority. It really is something which has to be driven from the centre. This Government came into being on the basis of looking after the health of the nation. If it is to be a case of promoting that, then this is part of that culture. It is more important than perhaps it has been demonstrated.

  (Angela Eagle)  How would you suggest we would promote it?

  237.  There needs to be the targeting and the promoting of the whole culture of allotments, which the Government has not been doing.

  (Angela Eagle)  I do think that within an overall framework of Agenda 21 sustainability, and the documentation we are putting out asking local authorities to pay attention to these things, it fits in there. I made a positive statement about the benefits of allotment gardening. I do not think that for a Government which came into power wanting to decentralise power and wanting to give local authorities back their power, that it is reasonable for us to be too prescriptive at a national level about whether people should garden in allotments or not. We think there are positive benefits. I have said there are positive benefits. There are good statutory protections, but the fact remains that there are still 42,000 vacant allotment plots of those 296,000 which exist. So there is no evidence of a massive under-supply of allotment plots at the moment.

  238.  What examination is there in terms of that 47—I understand that figure is up to 51. What examination is done by you? Is that brought to your attention when one of these applications comes in, or is it done at official level?

  (Angela Eagle)  Which applications?

  (Angela Eagle)  No, this is done at Government office. The potential is if there is a big row and there are lots of objections, that it could be called in and brought to a Minister's attention. But in the 47 cases that we have had since May, there have been no objections. So, like all planning legislation that tends to be done at official level, unless there is controversy when Ministers may be asked to decide; but there has been no controversy that is registered in any of these disposals. There have been no objections to the local authorities wishing to dispose of these 47 sites. In that instance Ministers do not get to see it.[5]