Allotments 4 All

Wow really? You can't on ours...

The committee might be able to go on any plot but where does it say you can remove things without the plot holders permission?

That sounds like dictatorship not democracy to me. You know rightly or wrongly you cannot tell people what to do and how to do it.

Wouldn't dream of removing them... but we can go on to "see"  :)

I do too, but you can only give advice.  Some listen some don't and that's how allotments are.

Would love to see the leaflet if you do one Robert.

It's normal to allow the committee to 'enter' the plot, but there's a difference between that and interfering with crops, even if they are diseased.

Simple answer: it's totally unacceptable for anyone - committee included - to set foot on a plot without the allotmenteer's permission, and everything on the plot - diseased material included - belongs to the allotmenteer and no one has a right to mess with it.  If the allotmenteer is doing something that breaks a condition of the tenancy agreement then the landlord's only option is to warn the tenant, and ultimately evict her.

Complicated answer:  No one has a right to mess with the allotmenteer's stuff, though in practice there's little the tenant could do if her diseased tomatoes had been removed.  Technically I'd guess it was either theft or criminal damage but I very much doubt the police would be interested, and she could only sue for actual loss, and in reality she hasn't suffered any.  It might be different if the interfering was repeated and could be seen as intimidatory because then the police might look at it as harassment.

Whether anyone else has a right to enter your plot depends on whether you have a lease or licence, and that's a notoriously difficult thing for the courts to decide, but generally you have exclusive posession of your plot, and that makes it a lease.  Exclusive posession means that the tenant controls the whole of her plot and no one else can come and plant stuff on it and make use of it in some other way.  Contrast that with the Landshare arrangements where people let gardeners come and work a bit of their garden - the whole of the garden is still free to be enjoyed by the homeowner, but the gardener is granted a licence to use part of the garden as well.

Whether you have a lease or a licence is a question of fact, but Councils that let their allotments under the allotments acts only have the power to lease the plots, so a council letting plots under licence would be acting ultra vires and could be challenged.  Mostly though plots will be leased, and a term of the tenancy agreement that grants the landlord unlimited access is just unenforceable because exclusive posession is a fundamental feature of a lease.  Take it to Trading Standards, they'll sort the landlord out.  The landlord is entitled to reasonable access for maintenance, but she still needs to ask for permission and that certainly doesn't include going onto the tenant's plot to mess about with her stuff just because the landlord doesn't like what she sees.

So in short:  there are committees out there - no, there are people out there who get themselves onto committees - who need to show a bit more respect for their tenants.