Don’t Lose the Plot!
ANDREW COLQUHOUN has had an allotment at Lower Torfield in Hastings Old Town for about 20 years, but admits that his wife Stephanie still grows better veg than he does. Honours are more even for fruit. He chairs the Hastings and St Leonards Allotment Federation, which brings together all the sites across the Borough.
People who know me would not expect me to be a natural supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. If I had been at Glastonbury in June 2017 (which I wasn’t), I would probably have stayed shamefacedly shtum, or whistled Dixie, while the rest of the crowd chanted “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to him on the Pyramid Stage.
But the Jezzer has just shot up in my estimation. As the country’s most famous allotmenteer (even ahead of Ken Livingstone), he has just come out with a robust statement against a notion from Angela Rayner that local authorities might allow the sell-off of even more allotments for housing, over and above the eight sites which she has already approved elsewhere in England.
Writing for The Daily Telegraph (!!), Mr Corbyn said these decisions would “fill many with deep dismay” and accused Ms Rayner of making “the future of these precious spaces even more perilous”. Praising the Diggers, English Civil War dissidents who sought common ownership of land, he said: “Is this Government going to put the nail in the coffin of the joy of digging ground for potatoes on a cold, wet February Sunday afternoon?”
He goes on to point to the social, economic and health benefits of allotments for those with no gardens but who want to grow food for their families.
We know that Angela Rayner is desperate to hit her 1.5 million target for new homes by the time of the next General Election. And it looks as though she is less and less likely to get anywhere near that figure. So what next from the Tory playbook? Selling off school playing fields for housing?
But Jeremy Corbyn is not going to let Ms Rayner ease her problem at the expense of allotmenteers. And to their credit the Green Party administration in Hastings and St Leonards came out quickly with an equally robust line: “Our allotments are not for sale”.
Cllr Julia Hilton, deputy leader of the Council, said: “We fully recognise the great benefits these spaces provide to people, from promoting physical activity and wellbeing, to supporting social connections and offering the chance to access fresh, locally grown produce……..This administration will not be selling off any allotment sites, and the Hastings Local Plan recognises their value and resists the loss of them.”
That’s a brave line when our local housing targets are so challenging. But it appears to be backed up by the draft Local Plan to 2039 for the town when its last iteration was publicly available: that showed no threats to local allotments – and Julia Hilton has confirmed this in her statement.
As the Hastings and St Leonards Allotment Federation, we have been pushing in the other direction – for more land for communal growing. We have been lobbying for the Local Plan to include a Planning Obligation which the Council could use to require a developer to provide space for growing communally in exchange for planning permission. And we have been looking for other pockets of land which might be brought into cultivation for local people – so far without success.
Nationally, land-grabs of allotments are nothing new. My first awareness of local politics was around 1960 when my father and other allotment holders were fighting the local authority in north London which wanted half the site for a school. The plot-holders lost, and the school got built.
Like many other areas of the country, the popularity of allotments in our town has waxed and waned over time – and then waxed again. There is some loose relationship with the economic cycle. In times of full employment and wage growth, the demand for allotments can drop: people have less time and less financial need to grow food for their families. But in times of greater hardship, demand for plots goes up again.
Local old folk, even older than me, have memories of allotment sites being more numerous and more extensive around the town. Perhaps because of a period of slump in demand, the Council took sites or part of them out of cultivation. And not necessarily for development: some areas became informal nature reserves.
But there is no doubt about the strength of demand in recent years, both nationally and locally. Hastings BC manages and rents out 13 sites covering 30 acres. That area provides about 630 individual plots. The current waiting list has over 500 names on it, so nearly as many people are waiting as there are plots. The biggest site is self-managed and so doesn’t feature in these Council figures. This is Marina Allotments with another 130 plots or so under a lease from Hastings BC; there too the waiting list is long.
Thanks to the efforts of a previous generation of activists, particularly Peter Driver of Lower Torfield Allotments and Judy Clark of Bembrook Allotments, all the sites managed by Hastings BC have statutory protection. The statute in question is Section 8 of the Allotments Act 1925 which states “Where a local authority has purchased or appropriated land for use as allotments the local authority shall not sell, appropriate, use or dispose of the land for any purpose other than use for allotments without the consent of the Secretary of State.”
And who might be the current Secretary of State? The same Angela Rayner, the one with the housing problem, the one Jeremy Corbyn is cross with. It would seem unlikely that she would exercise that authority over the heads of Hastings BC, our local authority, which is why the firm statement from Julia Hilton is so important.
But with an acquiescent local authority allotment sites can be grabbed over the heads of residents which might be what happened in Storrington in West Sussex. That’s in addition to the eight sites mentioned above. All this presumably done at the request of the relevant local authorities.
And we have Local Government Reorganisation trundling towards us, whether we like it or not. Might a distant Sussex Mayor or an East Sussex authority with his or her own new housing targets to meet, be more inclined to override the statutory protection? Another reason for keeping a local Hastings Council?
The group of “Independents” in Hastings, who are a schism from the local Labour Party, has recently announced that they will be supporting the new left-wing party which Jeremy Corbyn has just co-founded. Plot-holders in Hastings and St Leonards will be hoping that they will be as firm as him in resisting future land-grabs and Lowland Clearances.
Perhaps we could help with a name for their party, currently going under the working title of “Your Party”. How about the NOMPPs: Not on my Plot Party? Or the Don’t Lose the Plot Party? Or the Marrow Majority – one of Jeremy’s favourite vegetables to judge from the photo in the Telegraph? Just some ideas for the cause.
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