What's happening with the City Council and Allotments?

'A town without a prosperous, powerful resident middle class is a town in trouble, and so is a town in which the middle class think that the country is better'
Mark Girouard, The English Town

Gloucester has been a city in trouble for some time, a pocket of urban deprivation in a wealthy rural hinterland. Its housing stock is mostly in the cheaper council tax bands but the proportion of citizens needing help is high. The City Council is beset by money problems and a sudden proliferation of urban regeneration initiatives has put even more pressure on its dwindling band of officers.

Allotments policy has been firmly in the 1930s up till now. Plots are huge, rental is cheap, money is tight. In the absence of a dedicated allotments officer there has been no promotion or development of allotments, and it appears they are a bit of a statutory nuisance.

Many departments have been involved with the Town Ham debacle:-

Culture, Learning and Leisure are responsible for day-to-day running of allotments through the Parks Department. They took the decision to close the site.

Planning drew up the Council's Allotments Policy but has no say in its implementation. They will only get involved if someone tries to build on the land.

The Contaminated Land Officer works for Environmental Services; he sampled the soil and made recommendations based on the results.

Legal Services will have advised Culture Learning and Leisure about the likelihood of being sued for negligence.

Policy and Communications will have handled the flow of information to the media and determined how much the plotholders were allowed to know.

Continental Landscapes are the contractors who maintain all the council's open spaces. They allocate plots and collect rental fees, pass on requests for repairs to Parks Department and tidy up the sites. They seem to be working from very old maps provided by the Parks Department when the service was contracted out. These are now out of date. There are no computerised records of plotholders and the information provided to the council concerning occupation at the Ham and at Estcourt has so far been wildly inaccurate.

With no-one to co-ordinate between departments or champion allotments they will continue to languish, though demand in the city is relatively high considering how little publicity they get. No one is getting to grips with the potential they have for delivering a lot of things considered desirable by the Council - community cohesion, healthy living, urban regeneration - and also for bringing in a lot more money than they do at present. If Gloucester wants to show off its quality of life and reverse the flow of professionals seeking an expensive rural idyll in its outlying villages it could do worse than take another look at its leisure gardens.