Tuesday 18 October 2011

Workshop Update

Well the workshop that I attended was pretty good and very well run. Participants were surprisingly well behaved and listened to what was presented.

Highlights from the presentations !

- There are 76 council owned allotment sites in Sheffield and one private site !
- Over 3,000 tenants and 2,200 people on the waiting list. Wow.
- Issued 59 notices to quit (which doesn't seem terribly high to me) and 593 letters about cultivation etc in 2011 to date.
- The budget has been cut by 10% for next year - no actual figures revealed.
- Sheffield is the only major city not to have any self managed council sites.

Following the presentations we were asked to consider two questions: what did we think about the current Council Subsidy (75%) and Rent Levels and what were our thoughts on being Self Managed.

We had to put our responses onto post-it notes and stick them to pieces of flip chart paper. All the input is being collected and analysed and will be fed back to plot holders.

The only negative was being harassed at the end of the meeting by one of my former idiot committee colleagues ... he managed to stop short of following me into the ladies loo, settling for waiting for me and my friend outside the door. Unbelievable. Perhaps he views me as an easy target, being female. You'd think he'd have got the message by now that I resigned from the committee to escape the lunacy that is their world.

Anyway I digress, if you have an opportunity to attend, I encourage you to do so. They've had 600 responses to the questionnaire so far (current tenants & waiting list - so 5,200 people)

10 comments:

  1. Call me a cynic, but I don't think any amount of feedback is going to change the fact the bill is going to go up. A lot.

    My feedback was that we don't feel they provide us with the 'service' they claim to at the moment - we have no security due to footpaths running through the site, over half the site can't access the car park as the path became so overgrown it is now 'lost', one of our lanes is so deeply rutted they can't even get a tractor down it to cut the hedges, the posts at the end of the lanes have been broken for over a year (despite promises to sort them), there are trees all over the site, the only plot clearances have been done with money from the community assembly not the allotment budget and plots aren't being re-let despite the claims - I walk past 10 plots to get to mine, 1 hasn't been touch since the turn of this year, 1 for well over a year and 1 for over 5 years! And for all those reasons we'll be opposing any increase in fees, even more so if it mean less of a 'service'!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow! 76 council owned allotments in one city alone. Impressive.

    ReplyDelete
  3. mmm of the 4 people on my table, one was on the waiting list (one of the waiting list people said they'd be prepared to pay 3x the current rent to get a plot !!!) and 3 were on subsidised rents (50%) ... I was the only full paying member and not suprisingly had different views :)

    I'll probably give up my plot once it hits the £100 mark. I agree about the services Rob.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Ducky, Sounds like a bit of a rum do! Don't turn your back on a politician (and that includes the committee from the sounds of it!)

    ReplyDelete
  5. never a true-er word spoken Mal !

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm glad you posted this; I hadn't had the letter about these workshops, despite them having both my postal and email addresses. The workshop I wanted to go to at Meersbrook is full but I've managed to get on to the one at Mosborough (not ideal, but...). A consultation exercise which people don't know about is a clever trick!!

    I agree with Rob that there isn't much evidence of 'service' at present. I'm semi-attracted to the idea of self-management, on the basis that it's always better to be directly in control than not. But that will only work if the money follows it and that would have to include both the direct cost AND the subsidy (and I can't see that happening) or societies would be trying to provide a similar service on 75% less money. That's doomed to failure.

    I think Rob is right too that the bill is going to go up substantially. By the time it does I'll probably be one of those on 50% discount but, to be honest, if it reached £100 I'd probably still pay, on the basis that it's still only £2 a week. But I'd want to see what I was getting for my money. It's very opaque what servcie is provided and what it costs. I'd like to see a basic-level service, with a costed service-level agreement whuich could be monitored and a menu of separately-chargeable other services.

    Oh dear, this sounds as though I'm back at work and I haven't retired yet (Thursday!!!!!!!!).

    Happy days!

    ReplyDelete
  7. do you know I almost emailed you to see if you were going, but I left it a bit late - sorry !

    Michael was giving us some examples of his site - apparently they can qualify for 75% rebate on their rent that they pay to Nottingham council (I'm sure they were one of the cheapest areas too!) if they get a 'gold star' inspection. So only paying 25% rent sounds v good !

    the reality of our site - 400 plots all hedged, most not 'viewable' from any paths would make the exercise of collecting rent v difficult - then where would you keep it - what if you were robbed ! I don't think I could face the waterbill and the rent bill. A big miss from the presentation was the split of how many pay full price vs how many pay 50% reduction - what if you have a site that couldn't actually support itself as it didn't take enough money. One of the stats they flashed up was that the council only made £78K from 3000 rents ... so average of £26 per person.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Wow - this sounds very informative, compared to what we get ... we have a superb (voluntary) site representative who fights for our site in every possible way, and we have a good allotment officer, but the water leaks are crazy, the rents increase massively every year, and the council are dividing all plots in two so you only get 5 rods which is barely enough to feed a small family - allotments are becoming like beach huts: too expensive for those who need them most!

    ReplyDelete
  9. well AB, we are suffering the same - water leaks, which take up most of the councils budget, rent increases over the next few years are going to be quite substantial (can't remember what the % differences were) and loads of our plots are being split into two and they look very small. I guess the biggest issue is the state of abandonment that most of the plots, certainly on our site, are suffering from - but then 76 sites and the only had one allotment officer. Now they have two ... hmmm ! The only reason the consultation is taking place at all is because the Allotment Federation managed to mobilise enough people in a week to prevent the council from just agreeing to the changes to when rent will be paid and the amount to be paid. As Rob says, unlikely that our views will count for much, especially as something similar was carried out a few years ago and left a very bad taste amongst those involved.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I managed to get to the workshop at Mosborough and, whatever the genesis of it, I think it was better to have had it than not.

    I think what we're seeing here is partly the result of the allotment service being allowed to stagnate over many years. Now they seem to be attempting to get to grips with it and modernise it. I applaud that but remain, obviously, concerned about the impact of the changes. Self-management is a bit of a theme but they'll have to get the financial arrangements right first; I wasn't convinced, by what I heard last week, that they'd thought that through properly.

    Interesting times ahead!

    ReplyDelete