The £10 million Allotment Loo
ANDREW COLQUHOUN previously wrote for HIP about the threat of allotments being sold off. This time it’s a new inconvenience.
HIP readers of longer vintage might remember Clochemerle. The BBC made a series out of it in 1972: of course in colour, we weren’t that primitive. The series was based on a short novel written back in the 1920s by Gabriel Chevallier. The theme of the book was a supposed dispute in the French village of Clochemerle in the Beaujolais region about the construction of its first pissoir for a thousand years, so probably its first ever. The socialist mayor wanted to put up the new loo near the church, too near for the parish priest. The rest of the village took sides and it ended badly (see below). It was all totally absurd and very funny.
This story came to mind when I heard about the equally absurd (but less funny) saga of a composting loo that the good plot holders of Bembrook Allotments on the West Hill want to put up. In these straitened times for public finances, they are prepared to find the money themselves through grants. They agreed a design with Hastings BC as their landlords – but were then told that they needed £10m of public liability insurance cover.
Now, a sense of risk is a personal matter: we differ. For myself, if you tried to get me into a helicopter (nasty, unnatural things which fall out of the sky), I would be reading right through to the appendices of the operating company’s insurance policy. Ditto my life insurance cover. But using a loo? As I lower my breeches and advance backwards towards the seat, underwriters are rarely on my mind. Other things might seem more urgent. Scorpions and funnel-web spiders are unlikely to be in residence locally. My sense of risk is even less in a pissoir.
Hastings BC must be operating with a different concept of risk when they ask for Bembrook for £10m of cover. But the unfortunate council officers who are told to execute this requirement haven’t themselves been told why they need to insist on such an extraordinary level of cover, or what the risk is.
So we are left imagining. Is there a history of seismic activity on the West Hill which might strike someone in situ? Bembrook is on that hill, so flooding is unlikely, let alone rising sea levels. A spark from a bonfire? Evacuation, so to speak, might be speedy in those circumstances. Might a small person fall in? But the composting process is not instantaneous, so plenty of time for East Sussex Fire and Rescue to pull the victim out (though hazmat suits might be advised for a novel form of rescue). But really, what else in terms of risk?
Bembrook allotmenteers are not alone in being told to cross their legs in the absence of insurance cover. At the Lower Cornwallis site, the toilet was closed and barred because the local association had collapsed, so apparently no insurance cover was possible. So too at Paul’s Field. But there is an important equality issue to consider when loos get closed: men can generally cope alfresco, but a lack of toilet facilities is a more serious issue for women.
You might think that the provision of a toilet by the council as landlords ought to be a basic requirement. In terms of public funds that’s not going to happen. So it is sad and frustrating that insurance issues might inhibit private initiative such as that at the Bembrook site.
The requirement for £10m of cover seems to be standard and arbitrary for other allotment activities. Another site has been told by the council that, without that level of cover, they must not undertake works which would bring several plots back into cultivation – at a time when the waiting list across the town is huge. Again, initiative is stymied.
But a Hastings Borough Council spokesperson said: “There is a process that must be followed before toilets can be installed on allotment sites. This includes getting the appropriate council permissions and being able to show that funding is in place for purchase, construction and ongoing maintenance of the facilities. As part of the process, a licence is required. This includes a requirement for public liability insurance to cover the allotment holders in the case of any potential future claim during construction and after the facilities have been built and in use by plot holders. As a standard, we require £10million of public liability insurance.”
It isn’t just allotments that are affected by this blanket policy on insurance cover. Su Barnicoat of Hastings Voluntary Action, the umbrella body for the local voluntary sector, commented “It’s understandable for public liability insurance to be requested for community activities taking place in public spaces, including allotments. Where it can be problematic for community groups is the cost relating to the level of risk. Outdoor activities such as gardening and growing are fairly low risk, and so an outlay of up to £400 p.a can be prohibitive to a few people just wanting to potter for a few hours. When volunteers are working on HBC spaces, it would make sense for HBC to find a ‘sensible’ solution, given that such activity is helpful to them.”
So how did it all end in Clochemerle? There was certainly no mention of insurance. Perhaps there should have been: scandals about the urinal grew and burgeoned, culminating in a near-riot in the church itself. After that, disasters followed fast. Jealous citizens from a neighboring village came by night and blew up the urinal. The Government, with mistaken zeal, quartered troops on Clochemerle and precipitated a real riot. Even then there was no telling what might have happened if a terrible thunderstorm had not descended on Clochemerle, ruined the grape harvest, and cooled off everybody’s passions.
Even allowing for the zeal with which Rother DC has been closing public loos in their area, it seems unlikely that the sans-pissoirs citoyennes and citoyens of Bexhill would storm the facilities of Hastings. Or is this a risk which HBC has foreseen? If so, ten million of cover might then be grossly inadequate.
Enough teasing. It seems that HBC, possibly for reasons of administrative convenience, wants to have a standard level of cover across all activities undertaken in the voluntary sector where there is some level of municipal involvement. That some level of cover is required would seem reasonable. But a disproportionate, arbitrary and standardised level without any assessment of actual individual risk is proving counter-productive. It’s putting obstacles in the way of those in the third sector who just want to make things better in our community.
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