Increase in allotment rents

Graph up Well, looks like our Allotment Association got a good result in battle with the Town Council over a proposed increase in allotment rents of up to 100%. The Amenities Committee’s decision was as follows…

  • Rents should increase by 10% from October 2011, so standard plots will cost £27.50 per year, small plots £13.75

  • Some of the income from rents should be reinvested to improve facilities

  • To avoid years of no increase followed by sharp rises, rents should increase annually by the rate of inflation

  • The current charging structure should remain (i.e. based on standard or small plots, rather than large, medium and small or based on ground area)

  • The Committee will look into the feasibility of providing concessions for pensioners or the unemployed

So that means by 2011 there’ll have been an average increase for the last three years of 3.3% (bearing in mind there was no increase in 2009 and 2010)… not a bad result. The pleasing thing was a desire by the Councillors on the Amenities Committee to invest some of the allotment income in improving facilities. Specific mention was made of toilets, this being one of the top requests by our members when we did a recent survey, click here to view the survey results. Of course the challenge now is to get members of the committee to carry this through.

It’s taken quite a bit of work to get a good result. In case any other Allotment Association is faced with the same challenge, here’s the way the issue developed and how our Association tackled the problem. Hope it’s a help!

Background

Although rents had not increased since 2008, in the years immediately prior there had been a 100% increase from £12.50 to £25.00 for a standard plot size of 250 sq metres. So there had certainly been an average of 20% increase over the previous ten years.

Current rents in 2010 are £25.00 for a standard sized plot and £12.50 for a small plot. However, plot sizes vary greatly. To see a scale plan of the plots at Hill Rise Allotments click here.

The facilities provided by the Town Council are basic. There are no communal facilities such as toilets or a hut, no secure fencing. Access paths are closed in winter because they are not metalled and water tanks can be more than 50 metres away.

First signs Mon 11-Oct-2010

The first indication that anything was afoot came in an on site liaison meeting with the Town Council in early October when the Town Clerk floated the idea of a change in charging structure to allow for the variety of plot sizes. Nothing at all about an actual rent increase.

The next we know about it was an item on the Amenities Committee’s agenda for 27-Oct-2010 about allotment rents. When we asked for a copy of the report behind the agenda item we received a document not only recommending changing the charging structure to large, medium and small, but also an increase in rents of either 100%, 40% or 20% depending on how you were affected by the charging structure change. You can read the Town Clerk's report by clicking here.

Delayed result Wed 27-Oct-2010

In Town Council committee meetings there’s fifteen minutes allowed for public participation when anyone can speak for a few minutes on an item to be considered by the committee. Richard, our Association Chairman, took the opportunity to put the Association’s views on the Town Clerk’s recommendations. The Amenities Committee then discussed the Town Clerk's report. Although the public can attend to listen to the discussion they cannot comment unless asked by a committee member to do so. Quite frustrating when a comment is innocently made which is incorrect or misleading!

The minutes of the meeting, which you can read by clicking here, don’t give any indication of the intensity of the debate. Voices were raised, points of order called and members displayed a fair degree of passion in their views. You can see from the minutes the decision was deferred to the next meeting for further information on allotment costs.

Preparation

In advance of the next meeting we did a fair amount of groundwork as follows…

Average allotment rent
We knew one of the things we would be under attack on was that our allotment rents were lower than the national average… but just how low?

Firstly we checked with the NSALG regional representative. She confirmed the more typical rent was £35 per year for a standard size plot of 10 rods or 250 square metres; for this you would be expecting the basic facilities of a water supply and secure fencing. We do have water tanks, although some plot holders have to walk more than 50 metres to access, but no secure fencing.

A few enquiries with allotments in surrounding villages and towns showed the following:

  • Huntingdon charge from £30 to £12.50, but all sites have 2 metre high metal fencing to secure

  • Cambridge charge from £30 to £10 and again all sites are secure

  • Alconbury are a newish self managed site where plot holders pay about £1 a week, £52 a year

Legal position
A trawl around the internet highlighted the following…

  • A Mr Harwood successfully challenged Reigate & Banstead Borough Council in the High Court Chancery Division when his allotment rent was increased by 300%. His argument was that the increase was not reasonable, and the judgement was that a Council could charge what it liked for allotment rental but as allotments are a recreational amenity, the rent increases must be in line with increases applied to other recreational amenities provided by the council. The Council cannot by law raise rents of allotment holders in isolation of other recreational amenities. This is discriminatory practice and is unlawful. The full transcript can be read here.

  • Bolton Council backed down from imposing increases of up to 700% on allotment holders in the light of the above decision. You can read the decision of the Borough Solicitor of Bolton here.

  • The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract Regulations 1999 makes it automatically unfair for the landlord to impose an arbitrary increase in rent. Guidance by the OFT on unfair terms in tenancy agreements indicates that unless increases are linked to such external factors as the RPI or evaluated by an objective person independent of the landlord they may be deemed to be unfair. The guidance under section 3.102 can be read here.

UPDATE: On 17-Feb-2012 Southampton County Court ruled against Eastleigh Borough Council when they tried to increase allotment rents by 60%. In essence the judge ruled...

  • Councils could not increase rents just to lower costs
  • Any increases should commesurate with those applied to leisure and other services
  • Councils should accept that allotments are a subsidised activity and therefore loss making

Grateful thanks to Alex Mullins, Chairman, Eastleigh & District Allotments, who successfully brought this case against the Borough Council for the princely sum of £50.

Press reports are available at BBC News, Southampton Daily Echo and Eastleigh News.

Final outcome Wed 24-Nov-2010

We received the Town Clerk's report for tabling at the next Amenities Committee several days beforehand, to read this click here. No definite recommendation this time, only to consider alternative charging methods and an increase in rents.

There’s some difference of opinion about the quality and quantity of work done by the Town Council’s grounds maintenance team on the allotments. The figures in the Town Clerk's report indicate 3 man days per week are spent on the allotments in summer, about 1 man day per week in winter, none of this involving any capital projects work. Our Association don’t recognise the three days a week in summer, and contend that often the grounds maintenance team have to come back and fix things they should have got right in the first place… why should we pay for shoddy work? Their work is primarily grass cutting and strimming about once a month and occasional site inspections.

However, any criticism of the grounds maintenance team has lead some Amenities Committee members to passionately jump to their defence, so we stayed well clear of that in our response to the Town Clerk's report. Following an HRAA Committee meeting on the Monday we agreed to major on accepting a reasonable increase in line with inflation, but retaining the current charging structure. We steered clear of making a legal challenge to avoid creating unnecessary conflict… we could always follow up later by putting the legal position if the decision didn’t go our way. Our response was emailed to each of the committee members, to read our response click here.

Since our Chairman Richard was away in Newcastle overnight I delivered a short summary of the Association’s views in the public participation section before the Amenities Committee meeting. To read that summary click here

You can get a flavour of the subsequent discussion by the Amenities Committee from the notes I took by clicking here. By the way, the comment by Mayor Councillor Hodge ‘If we applied the same increase as HRAA did for their membership fee we’d be almost at £30’ was one of those frustrating moments when I wished I could have responded. At our AGM we agreed to increase HRAA membership fees from £6 to £7 for a plot holder and from £4 to £5 for a cultivator or associate, the reasons being…

  • To put the Association’s finances on a sound footing. After one year of formal standing we had made a surplus of income over expenditure, primarily due to the St Ives Flower and Produce Show. And although the intention will always be to at least cover the Show’s costs from its own expenditure, we’re always at risk of spending quite a bit of money on the Show and then having a poor attendance or having to cancel because something happens at the venue.

  • We’d very much relied on our Chairman’s contacts to get speakers at low cost (e.g. a small gift) for events. If we wanted a continued high quality of speakers we recognised we’d have to allow for greater costs… at least to pay expenses, as well as covering a potential increase in the cost of hiring venues.

  • Finally, members get a 10% discount from local retailers on production of their membership card, with the average value of that discount being about £20 over a year… on that basis membership is a no-brainer!

The formal minutes of the meeting have yet to be published, but will be found on the Town Council’s Amenities Committee page, to access click here. You can also read the preceding post about this topic with more information at Increased Allotment Rents.

Making a pond

Pond And here’s the result so far of my clay lined wildlife pond (click to enlarge). Had a brainwave… why incur the cost of lining when our allotment site has so much clay around? So lots of digging clay from the middle and using it to line the sides, which I made fairly shallow so the grandchildren won’t fall in.

I’d been worrying about all the water I’d need to haul back and forth from the nearest water tank. Silly me! The pond was full of water before I knew it and I could only dig it to the depth of my wellies. Apparently this is the best time of year to dig a pond for that reason… so it fills naturally with rain water.

Need to get a bit more depth. The middle should be one metre deep so it’s unlikely the pond will freeze over in winter and therefore frogs can to overwinter.

I’m going to keep a photo record of the pond’s development to track how plants and creepy crawlies make it their home. I’ve read a recommendation to let the pond develop naturally rather than adding plants or wildlife. I agree with the latter, but I’m not sure I can be patient enough for the former to develop.

It’s been getting a bit wet at pitch and putt. Normally David turns up in his trainers and goes home with wet feet, so I  bought him an early Christmas present of a pair of wellies… they’ll also help when he’s taking Jazz out for a walk. Well, after his first round last week in the new foot attire we’re back on to ‘You’re never going to beat me… in these wellies’. On a grey, wet and windy day he had an unbelievable 18 hole round of 63, comfortably beating my summer record of 65. In the process he also equalled my 9 hole record of 30. I’ll have to puncture a hole in his wellies when he’s not looking to get things back to normal!

Son John also beat me the last time we played following an unbelievable shot on the 9th. He’d gone ahead by several strokes early on with me clawing back to being only one shot down as we teed up on the 9th. This being the longest hole, he brought all the weight training into play and pitched off with all his might. The ball flew way over the green and was saved from going some distance into the members’ putting green by hitting the back fence, then bouncing back on to the 9th green to rest a mere few feet away from the hole.

Sick? I was so upset I pitched my shot into the row of conifers to the left and spent what seemed a lifetime hacking my way towards the green. John added insult to injury by dropping his putt for a two. Suddenly finding myself seven shots down and emotionally fragile, I never recovered.

You may remember from a fairly short post a couple of weeks ago that I was in the middle of compiling our allotment association’s autumn newsletter. You can now read that issue by clicking the link under the ‘Welcome’ section on the right.

Lots of photos and video below… bit of a catch up.

 

 

Here’s the two great fossil diggers on a visit to the allotment. And yes, they did find fossils… they always do.

 

And here’s Sammy displaying his whistling skills during a coffee visit to The Dolphin.

 

Izzy gives it a go as well.

 

Princess Paige tries to pin Connor down to give him a kiss.

 

Sparrowhawk on our back fence having lunch.

 

Thinking allowed

thinking_man Was listening to some of my BBC Radio 4 recordings over the weekend, one of my favourite pastimes. I’d considered recording Thinking Allowed for some time but never got round to it. Often I’m a bit pressed for recording slots since my beloved Pure Evoke-3 radio will time the recording of up to 20 programmes and I can easily fill that on my Saturday ritual of going through the TV guide picking out the best of the week’s radio offerings.

Anyway, the programme is on every Wednesday at 16:00, repeated on Mondays at 00:15. I suppose one of the things that put me off listening was the programme description as ‘New research on how society works’. Hmmm… that sounds heavy. But I’m glad I did record it since the very first article had my attention. You can listen to this particular broadcast by clicking here.

This first article was about the disastrous consequences of a drug trial in 2006 and the lessons learned. The contributors then went on to talk about normalisation of deviance. Tricky little phrase, isn’t it. How about the following quotation from Scott Snook which puts it another way:

Each uneventful day that passes reinforces a steadily growing false sense of confidence that everything is all right – that I, we, my group must be OK because the way we did things today resulted in no adverse consequences.

Now I accept this isn’t what you’d normally expect to read on my blog about everyday things. But what caught my attention was the regularity that the root cause of problems is all about normalisation of deviance… or I suppose you could put it more simply as complacency. Nothing went wrong today so everything must be OK. But this complacency effects us all continually at both work and home … and for some the effect is catastrophic.

For example, at present the news is full of the enquiry into Staffordshire Hospital, where its reckoned hundreds of people died at the hands of a hospital whose management put budgets and targets ahead of patient care. Untrained receptionists assessing patients in A&E? Patients being forgotten in corners of wards, left unwashed and untended for weeks? Hard to believe this is an NHS Hospital in the UK subject to external assessment which was failing patients for years. Normalisation of deviance.

One of my jobs in the past has been work measurement and process improvement. Ideal job for someone who’s nosey and a paid up member of the awkward squad, and I suppose that’s why this topic appealed to me. I’ve learned through hard experience that the danger time is when everything seems to be running smoothly. That’s just hiding the faults, and very often it’s the workers on the front line who know the dangers and may well have adopted some avoidance procedures the managers know nothing about.

Put in place a process with checks and balances. And never forget that where human beings are involved, unless you occasionally check things personally it’ll all end up in a heap some time in the future.

Here’s some more examples of extreme failures that are difficult to understand.

TGN1412 Clinical Trial

On 13 March 2006, six healthy young volunteers took part in a clinical trial in which they were injected at ten minute intervals with a drug developed to fight autoimmune disease and leukaemia. Very soon afterwards they became violently ill. One of the two additional volunteers injected with a placebo who showed no ill effects recalled to newspaper reporters: “The men went down like dominoes. They began tearing their shirts off complaining of fever, then some screamed that their heads were going to explode. After that they started fainting, vomiting and writhing around in their beds.” All six suffered multiple organ failure, and were admitted to intensive care.

Prior to the 1980s guidance on such trials was that each injection of a volunteer should be spaced by about an hour to check there was no violent or unexpected reaction before the next volunteer was put at risk. Sounds pretty sensible doesn’t it. For some reason that part of the guidance was dropped and it became the norm to inject volunteers without any safety break.

Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster

The disaster that occurred on 28-Jan-1986 arose from failure of an O-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster. Hard to believe then that immediately prior to the event Thiokol (the contractor) objected to the launch of the shuttle due to abnormally low temperatures and fear of malfunction of the O-ring.

This was a high profile and unique event for NASA… it was scheduled to be the first flight of a new program called TISP, the Teacher In Space Program. The Challenger was scheduled to carry Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher to fly in space having been selected from among more than 11,000 applicants from the education profession.

For years NASA had continued shuttle launches in spite of recurring damage and an inherent defect in the O-rings. And finally in a midnight hour long conference on the eve of the launch with the engine contractors telling them directly NOT to launch in such cold conditions for fear of O-ring failure, NASA management pressures again took precedence over safety.

 Royal Air Force Nimrod XV230

The Nimrod crashed in Afghanistan on 02 Sep 2006 killing 14 military personnel having suffered a leak during midair refuelling, this entering the bomb bay where it caught fire either as the result of an electrical fault or hot air leaking from a heating pipe.

On 23 May 2008 the coroner who led the inquest into the deaths stated that the entire Nimrod fleet had “never been airworthy from the first time it was released to service” and urged that it should be grounded. Assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire Andrew Walker added: “This cavalier approach to safety must come to an end. There were failures...[in monitoring the planes' safety]...that should, if the information had been correctly recorded and acted upon, have led to the discovery of this design flaw within the Nimrod fleet”.

At the subsequent review the summary stated “Its production is a story of incompetence, complacency and cynicism.”

Allotment rent increase

Money 01Looks like our allotment association is lining up to do battle with the Town Council over its plans to increase most allotment rents by up to 40%. That comes after an average rise of 20% for each of the last five years.

The first mention of any change was during an on site meeting, when the Town Clerk made a tentative proposal to address the great variety of plot sizes (see allotment plan below, click to enlarge) by changing from that currently used of either standard or small plot sizes to large (i.e. normal sized), middle and small. No mention of any increase in fees.

So it was somewhat surprising to then see a proposal being made to the Amenities Committee to change the rent structure from the current one of £25 and £12.50 to £35 for a large plot, £25 for medium and £15 for small. This would bring increase allotment income for the Town Council by £1,100.

Fortunately Councillors felt unable to come to a decision since there were no figures provided in the proposal paper on how much it cost to run the allotments. These are to be provided at the next meeting on Wed 24-Nov, but there were figures in other parts of the papers for that night’s meeting as follows…

  • Income from rents £4,500
  • Expenditure of £7,940 , broken down as…
    • £7,390 staff costs (572 hours)
    • Maintenance/improvements £500
    • Clerk £50

Hopefully we’ll get a lot more information about the staff costs since there are doubts about value for money. The hours equate to about 2 man days a week working on the allotments from March to October. Excluding recent capital investments, the biggest effort seems to be cutting and strimming the pathways… something which takes place about once a month and certainly shouldn’t take more than 2 man days to do.

We hope there are legal challenges we can make, such as….

  • Reigate & Banstead Borough Council were successfully challenged by a Mr Harwood in the High Court Chancery Division when his allotment rent was increased by 300%. His argument was that the increase was not reasonable, and the judgement was that a Council could charge what it liked for allotment rental, but as allotments are a recreational amenity the rent increases must be in line with increases applied to other recreational amenities provided by the council. The Council cannot by law raise rents of allotment holders in isolation of other recreational amenities. This is discriminatory practice and is unlawful. The full transcript can be read here.

    Bolton Council backed down from imposing increases of up to 700% on allotment holders in the light of the above decision. You can read the decision of the Borough Solicitor of Bolton here.

  • The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract Regulations 1999 makes it automatically unfair for a landlord to impose an arbitrary increase in rent. Guidance by the OFT on unfair terms in tenancy agreements indicates that unless increases are linked to such external factors as the RPI or evaluated by an objective person independent of the landlord they may be deemed to be unfair. The guidance under section 3.102 can be read here.

There are competing arguments about whether allotment holders should pay anything. Users of play areas and parks don’t pay over and above their rates for the use, and visitors to the town don’t pay anything at all. Or is it more equitable for allotment holders to pay the cost of maintaining allotments since only they are allowed access? Whatever the outcome, the Town Council certainly shouldn’t make a profit out of allotment holders, and we certainly have a right to know exactly what we’re paying for.

So we eagerly await the more detailed proposal papers from the Town Council to be issued about a week before the next meeting!

You can read the follow up to this post at Increase In Allotment Rents.

 

Hill Rise allotment plan

Allotment plan

You might also like...

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...