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The linked article says the council are proposing to increase the rent of a full plot (which I'm assuming to be 10 pole) from £31 to £100. That's actually a 223% increase, but the significant point is that it goes up to £100 and that's very expensive for an allotment, top 3% by the latest University of Leiscester national analysis. At this cost it will surely exclude some of the least able from having an allotment - the very demographic that the movement is supposed to serve.Will the council discuss the option of self-management with you Poet? It typically costs tax-payers quite a bit to subsidise their council's allotment service and I can't agree this is right when allotmenteers can quite happily run the service themselves at zero cost to the tax-payer, and when councils are slashing services for the disadvantaged and needy because to save the tax-payer a few quid it seems obscene to me that an allotment service should take priority.
the problem i have is that we don't know any of the other allotment tenants, that is why i'm trying to get everyone to join the facebook group. I can't do this on my own. we have no contact details for any of the reps from each site and the council won't give me that info.
Quote from: Poet on January 29, 2012, 12:58:33the problem i have is that we don't know any of the other allotment tenants, that is why i'm trying to get everyone to join the facebook group. I can't do this on my own. we have no contact details for any of the reps from each site and the council won't give me that info.I sympathise. You definitely need strength in numbers, and it wouldn't surprise me if your council tried to suppress and frustrate your attempts to organise. I don't do facebook so I can't comment on how successful this might be. Try to talk to plot holders in person too. Best of luck.
we don't know who the rep is for our site and the notice board doesn't have their details on.
Quote from: Poet on January 29, 2012, 13:26:39we don't know who the rep is for our site and the notice board doesn't have their details on.The site rep represents the council so it's not them you need to be talking to, it's your fellow allotmenteers. If your site doesn't have an association then you need to start one yourself, and you don't need your council's involvement to do that, you just need to talk to your fellow allotmenteers and sound them out. If you can get half a dozen who want to form a committee and organise themselves into an assoication then you're off and running.
do you know much/anything about the allotment act? Doesn't it say that councils cannot raise the rent to unaffordable levels? £100 would be unaffordable to almost everyone i should think. It would be cheaper to buy fruit and veg.
As Ellen K said, there is a lot of stuff on the forum. Do some searching and you'll get a lot of useful information.Please don't get into a discussion of the ins and outs of Unwashed's (or anyone else's) ongoing cases. That would not be helpful.
Poet, people have made helpful comments to point you in the right direction. I spent 20 minutes searching and copying links to threads where people from your site/near your site have posted here in the past. If you can find others who agree with you, then you won't have to go it alone but no-one here is going to do the work for you. There is a lot of information here about rent increases, comparisons between sites and due process that you'll be able to find if you use the search facility. That's all.