Topic: Amount of council involvement

[rdak]

Just wondered how much your council (assuming your allotment is owned/run by them) are involved in your allotment? For me, it just seems to be paying the rent once a year and they leave you to it. They do empty the communal skip when they remember and sent a form asking for feedback with the last payment demand.
Do other councils get more involved than this?

[Doris_Pinks]

Rdak, ours does pretty much the same as yours! Lets us get on with it, which I think I rather like!! We don't have anything that needs emptying, so they actually do even less than yours! DP

[Alan_Y]

Hi All, In Halton Cheshire we have a designated allotment officer who visits the sites on a regular basis. He also has a 3.5 ton tipper wagon which he assists anyone to bring sheds,greenhouses, wood , flags ets to the site. He also in partner ship with Mersy waste and Halton's Healthy Living Project is able to get and deliver to sites a soil conditioner, aprox 100 to 500 ton  on request only basis. (Mersy Waste collect all the green compostable waste from local council waste sites compost it down and shread it to make a bulky fiberous organic growing medium.)
He also sprays vacant plots pathways  etc , organises the allotment compertition and presentation evening along with workshops and lots more besides . All free of charge.

Halton allotment tenants pay just £24 per year this includes freeskips on request and water charges plus the services as above . Value for money I think unless you know different.

Regards

Alan  

[Mrs Ava]

Wow Alan!  Great service  :o  Certainly great value for money.

[Alan_Y]

Emma, Forgot to mention that I'm the allotment officer :). If you can't blow your own trumpet once in a while. No one else will. ;D

[Mrs Ava]

hehehehe, good for you Alan.  Our plot isn't council, has no running water, only a small stream/ditch, no security and no carpark and costs the small fortune of 2.50 a year!  I have just taken on another half a plot, and I have been told I can run it for the rest of this year for free and start paying from September when the dues are due.  So, no involvement from anyone really.  We all kinda muck in a fix things that need fixing, and it seems to work and has done for the last 28 years that 'old jack' can remember.

[crickett1234]

The site I am on is council run.  We have recently had new gates and fencing put up around the site (but now the gate is all metal instead of wood, you end up making enough noise to wake the dead when you go to the plot early in the morning!).

There is a "caretaker" for the site who lives close by and who keeps an eye out for people coming and going.  There is an allotment officer at the Council, but no one has ever seen them in the flesh, so they could be a figment of everyone's imagination!

There is water to the site which is cut off in winter, and traditionally, there has been an ever present threat of houses being built on the site... That is until they read the deed gifting the land to the council.  The document from the estate of the Duke of Portland was drafted in such as way that they are allotments for ever, and the Council can not take them away.  Hee hee!   ;D

[Alan_Y]

Crickett, One of our biggest and best sites is called Haddocks Wood. I have only been in post for two years and in that time the allotment association and I have managed to get grants to the value of over £20,000. The association have just been sucsesfull in securing anothet £5,000 to develop another 3 plots including a roadway and water pionts. This work will be starting in the next few weeks. If all goes well they should also hear from another grant for £5,000 by the end of this month in which they will extend the 3 new plots to 6.
The borough has a 15 sites and a total of 278 plots at the moment  with only 8 vacancies . Some sites are more popular than others hence a waiting list of 43 people 12 of which are waiting for the new bevelopments at Haddocks Wood to be constructed.
Haddockd Wood also has the followinf to offer.

• Security Lighting
  CCTV
  Large Carparking areas
  Toilet
  On Site Shop
  Communial Large portacabin that doubles up as a meeting room /classroom when I take school groups or do workshops.
  Designated school bouble allotment plot
  Communial growing area ( Produce is sponcered and given to local community caffe's, a cancer hospice and other charities like Scope.
  Orchard with 16 traditional varieties  of Cheshire apples
  Pond with disables acces and boardwalk for environmental studdies etc with local rangers.
  

Great site great people. Very Proud.

Alan Y

[Alan_Y]

Crickett, One of our biggest and best sites is called Haddocks Wood. I have only been in post for two years and in that time the allotment association and I have managed to get grants to the value of over £20,000. The association have just been sucsesfull in securing anothet £5,000 to develop another 3 plots including a roadway and water pionts. This work will be starting in the next few weeks. If all goes well they should also hear from another grant for £5,000 by the end of this month in which they will extend the 3 new plots to 6.
The borough has a 15 sites and a total of 278 plots at the moment  with only 8 vacancies . Some sites are more popular than others hence a waiting list of 43 people 12 of which are waiting for the new bevelopments at Haddocks Wood to be constructed.
Haddockd Wood also has the followinf to offer.

• Security Lighting
  CCTV
  Large Carparking areas
  Toilet
  On Site Shop
  Communial Large portacabin that doubles up as a meeting room /classroom when I take school groups or do workshops.
  Designated school bouble allotment plot
  Communial growing area ( Produce is sponcered and given to local community caffe's, a cancer hospice and other charities like Scope.
  Orchard with 16 traditional varieties  of Cheshire apples
  Pond with disables acces and boardwalk for environmental studdies etc with local rangers.
  

Great site great people. Very Proud.

Alan Y

[Steve__C]

Hi,
We recently mugged negotiated with Basildon Council (Essex). They have replaced our fences, trimmed our hedges, helped clear the site of debris and then given us the site for a pepper-corn rent of £1 per year for a site of 40 plots.

They are still very supportive, we are independent, and we have turned around the occupancy rate from 50% to 100%. We now have the site looking at its best its looked for many a long year.

The Council are happy, they are not spending vast amounts of money on collecting a small amount of rent.

Any treat of forced closure is greatly reduced now that we have 100% occupancy.

The site is improved; the Council has its ticks in all the right boxes, therefore everyone is happy.

It takes the committee of 3 - about three evenings a year to run.
We have approx £800 to spend on the site, including cost of insurance.
Before we started negotiating we had nothing spent on us. And as an official organisation in the future we can secure grants to make improvements.

If I were you, and you are Council run, take control and fight to become self managed. You may be amazed at the response.

[gavin]

Bloody hellfire - had a converstaion with a council allotment officer a bit back.  His annual budget is £2,000.  For the city.  Enough for a packet of cigarettes a day, box of matches, and a paper.

Can we have a virulently, biliously envious "green smiley", please?

All best - Gavin

[Alan_Y]

Steve -C
Its good to hear other sites are on the up, Regarding self management this has been under discussion for a while but Haddocks Wood feel that they are better of being councul run at the moment as Water charges alone on the site would be in exess of £900 per year plus they get to mither me on a regulare basis . It would take the fun out of my job.

All the best.

Alan

[Linda]

Gosh, yes, definatley green with envy!

Our Council sends us a bill. That's it.

All the allotment sites in the area are self managed, which means we collect the money and run the site, and we pay most of the collected money to the council in rent.

We are responsible for all expenses to do with the site, including major infrastructure like fences. My own site has about £400 left after paying rent to the council, and I am surprised every year at how much we manage to do with it!

Self management is great in that we get to decide on things, but not so great if the terms of the lease are that we are responsible for everything.

The council uses our rent to run the help run the 'property services' office in the town hall. Apparently there is about £2000 at the end of each year left over, which goes into the general fund.

There is no allotments budget in our Council, but they manage to spend somewhere in the region of £10,000 of rents raised by us to staff the phone (if you phone up you will be given a list of local allotment secretaries) and work out our bills. Great eh??!

Love and compost
Linda

[andham2000]

Our council in Bath seems to spend all its money on either Bath in Bloom or the Bath Spa project. Supposedly the bath spa was to be opened last summer and with spiraling cost it is still not open. Not that anyone wants it anyway.

this means that the council will cut back in other areas, apart from cutting the grass once in a while. The council does nothing for my allotment site, it does seem to do a lot more for the sites that are seen by tourists. - coincidence?

we have had our allotment vandalised and someone even had a whole shed stolen. I also have had a sofa dumped on my allotment and the compost bins are full of rats and takeaway wrappers and only get emptied once in a blue moon.

grrrr.

Still don;t want to give up my alloment though, just be nice to swap councils.

andy
http://www.selfsufficientish.com ;)

[Columbus]

Council allotments are about £30/year in Norwich but they like to send letters threatening legal action for non-payment of rents in the same post as the bills  :( or ... just to vary it a bit.. threaten to take your plot away for non-payment of rent weeks after the cheque cleared. >:(
Aside from the annual rents fiasco (which can be very upsetting after hundreds of hours of work clearing an overgrown plot :'( ) they like to present themselves as a benevolent organisation, We get an annual allotment show, We get the paths strimmed regularly, attempts at security on the site and running water in spring and summer. Best of all, last week I persuaded a leaf-sweeping gang to deliver I few truck loads of fallen leaves for us.  8)
I think the service you get varies from site to site and who you know.  :-X

Col.

[EvieB]

Emma, Forgot to mention that I'm the allotment officer :). If you can't blow your own trumpet once in a while. No one else will. ;D

what bloody trumpet? you never told us about any trumpet,,,can we use it to grow veggies in Alan, can we? ;D ;D