Earthwork

Didn't think I'd be saying this, but well done Newbury Town Council.  They have recognized the fairness of giving sufficient notice of a rent increase.  Rent is due March 1st and although the Council still get to decide the increase unilaterally they are obliged by the new tenancy agreement to tell us about any increase by 1st February and it doesn't take affect until 1st April, thus we get at least 13 months notice of any increase.  In six months time we'll see if the Council actually honour the agreement.

That the Council continue to decide the increase without any reference to an external standard such as the Retail Price Index almost certainly still makes the rent review clause unfair under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999, but they can always give notice to end the agreement and offer a new one on new terms with the same notice so in practice it's not really anything to get too worried about, but by the same token they could just have easily complied with the Regulations, so that does seem just that little bit petulent.

More troublesome is that the clause allowing the Council to make unilateral changes to the rules remains and that is certainly unfair under the Regulations, and that underlying contempt for fairness is deeply worrying.

I wrote about my confusion over the Council's claim that the average allotment rate is in the £6 to £7 range, and the Council have responsed to my interest.

Stephanie Kirke asked if Newbury Town Council had checked other council’s charges?

Granville Taylor stated that we had investigated other allotments' fees, adding that we had found that some self managed sites were as much as £100.00 per pole.  Cllr Johnson added that the average costs found were around £6 to £7 per pole.

And the Council's followup statement

Thurrock Council charge equates to £8.25 per pole.  Enfield charges £6.30 per pole plus £9 per year water which equates to £7.20 per pole.  Research of rents reported on the internet suggests a wide variety of rents, depending on a variety of factors and level of service, so a true comparable average is difficult to establish.

A true comparable average is difficult to establish? Yeah, right.  Not being funny, but Thurrock and Enfield?  They're are not even remotely close to Newbury.  How can you possibly pick Thurrock and Enfield at random and suggest that they define anything like a comparable average rate?  For goodness sake, they don't even have an average rate in the range Cllr Johnson suggested!  What is going on?  It's nothing but a cynical attempt to cast Newbury's £6.94 per pole in a favourable light, and it's simply dishonest.  The likely average rate around Newbury is between £3.0 and £4.0 and at £6.94 Newbury's rate is the most expensive I found in my sample.

But there's more.  Following up the assertion that self-managed council sites charge £100 per pole the Council have clarified that they were refering to

Wyevale charge the equivalent of £144 per pole for a fully serviced plot, or £72 / pole without shed or greenhouse.  The New Allotment Company charge £41.66 per pole.

Wyevale garden centres do indeed run a grow-you-own scheme with 3.6 pole plots complete with shed and greenhouse costing £10 per week, but these are not self-managed sites in any sense, they are commercially managed by Wyevale.  They are hardly even allotments in the usual sense.  The New Allotment Company have a single site at Honnington which again is commercially managed and not in any sense a self-managed site, and less than half the £100 per pole that the council were talking about.

The question was very specifically asking about council sites so an honest answer could for example have mentioned the Eynsham Allotment Association who manage their site for the parish council and charge £1.80 per pole, or the Great Yarmouth and Gorleston Allotments Association who manage a federation of sites without any funding or support from the local council and who charge £2.90 per pole.  In fairness there are self-managed sites that are quite expensive, not least Thurrock's, but in no sense does self-management equate with high rents.  Self-management in Newbury could realistically expect to improve the level of maintenance and improve facilities without raising the rents any more than they are now.

It was shamefully dishonest of the Council to imply that there are self-managed council sites charging anything like £100 per pole and it lays bare their strategy of suppressing any discussion of self-management so as to protect their self interst.  The benefits of self-management are well documented, not least the allotmenteers' control over their rents, but the service is effectively a £115k turnover business for the Town Council and they have no intention of losing it.

This is my sample that I presented to the Council at the 1 March Community Services Committee, though you'll find it has been sensored from the minutes.

The new Tenancy Agreement is again up before the Community Services Committee on Monday 26 July.  The Committee on 24 May couldn't decide what to do, so they did nothing, and now they'll have another go.

The Council set an unlawful rent increase in January because the rent review term that allows the Council to set whatever increase it wants (47% in this case) is unfair under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999.

The Council's difficulty is that they knew about the Regulations and decided to set the increase anyway, publicly denying that the Regulations applied, so redrafting the agreement to comply with the Regulations is incongruous.

The Council have to ratify the new Agreement Monday otherwise Trading Standards will start getting uppity, and then they'll insist that everyone sign it as soon as possible to legitimise the unlawful increase they made in January and escape from any criticism that they behaved unlawfully.

The earliest the Council can actually enforce a new contract is 1st April 2012 because of the notice they need to end the current agreement, and so the earliest they can legitimately increase the rent under the new agreement is April 2013, though as it stands the new Agreement is still not compliant with the Regulations.

The latest figure are now out for the Policy and Resources Committee agenda.

This isn't exactly how Newbury Town Council present the figures because they don't allocate any of the £172k cost of central administration to the services and neither do they allocate £214k of overheads to the services from things like town halls running costs and civic duties.  They also don't like to seperate out the administration costs so obviously.

Admin costs are the costs of the service team staffing plus a proportion of the central administration costs, and the overheads are the things like the cost of running the Council pickup which are already shared out amoungst the services plus an allocation of the committee, town hall, grants, civic, and young people's council.

Allotment self-management would save the tax-payer the running costs and the cost of administering the service which together makes almost a £60k saving without any pain, but the overheads can be saved too.  Saving money on the civic budget, or the young people's council isn't so obviously linked to devolving management of the allotments, but the reality is that the allotment service accounts for 16% of what the Town Council delivers, and if it shrinks its service delivery by 16% it needs to diminish its pomp, so that's 16% less magnificence in the grants budget, 16% less extravegance in the committees, 16% less capacity in the office accomodation, etc.

While West Berkshire is experiencing the pain of the recession and cutting real services that affect real people, the Town Council have not yet grasped what's going on.  Self-managing the allotments would allow the Council to save nearly £100k of tax-payer's money and the allotment service would actually improve.