Allotments 4 All

Our council has opened a consultation (at Christmas, but let's not be churlish) on plans to change the way allotments are managed. These in a nutshell are its 4 suggested options:

Option 1 Devolve complete responsibility for all allotment matters to an external organisation.
Option 2 Create a borough-wide Allotment Association/Federation and devolve complete responsibility to that.
Option 3 Devolve responsibility to Sites.
Option 4 Partnership Approach, where the sites keep some of the rent, to do work, but the council maintains membership database.

All options also include new, stricter rules, a possible deposit scheme and a rent increase. The council would still do the legal work to evict tenants/give notice to improve under all 4 proposals.

I wonder, from your experiences, which of those options would you consider to be best for us long-term?
I'd like to have a strong site assoc, with the power to get stuff done quickly, which is not easy at the moment. But I'm worried we would have trouble getting enough active members to make it work.

The council says the amount the rent would go up by would depend on which option was chosen. But no info on how much. I guess option 4 would be the most expensive for us  :(

(Oh and I forgot there is of course an unspoken option 5, to keep things as they are, because any change would have to be voted on by the elected council. But money would have to be found from somewhere else to make up the budget shortfall. )

Self management all the way.  Our rents and costs are less than half of nearby sites that are council run. 

If you are unsure about having sufficient numbers to make it work then I would push for option 4 for a trial period of (say) two years. If everything went ok then transfer to option 3. If it did not go ok then revert to option 5 (although this is not going to be liked by the council probably).

Options 1 and 2 which devolve responsibility to outside bodies are both no-nos to me.

Either 3 or 4, depending on what exactly is on offer, and what you can handle yourselves. We have something like 4, drifting towards 3 as the Council loses funding. We find it works.

Thanks for your feedback.

I think I favour 4 because I'm not sure whether it's worth much savings-wise, to take over everything, when the council has economies of scale. But I would like the site associations to have access to membership lists, so we can meet new tenants, offer help, social events etc. At the moment we don't have anything like that and newcomers are really left on their own. That might be nice for some, but demoralising for others.

Anyway, we're planning a site association meeting, and we can talk through what we want from the new arrangements.

Cheers  :)