Letter to Haringey Council from Friends of Haringey Parks Forum

The following letter was sent to day:

Support Haringey's Green Spaces and Parks Service

To:  All Haringey Councillors, and to the leaders of the Labour and Lib-Dem Parties.

The Council's policy, as set out in the current Open Space Strategy, is: ‘To enrich the quality of life for everyone in Haringey by working in partnership to provide safe, attractively designed, well used, well maintained open spaces for the benefit and enjoyment of the whole community.’  Public green spaces are an essential, popular and probably the most-used public service, vital for health, social cohesion, biodiversity, education, sport, flood control, climate change mitigation and many other outcomes fundamental to the future of all sections of all our communities in every corner of Haringey. 

As you will know, the Haringey Friends of Parks Forum (representing the borough's 40+ local Friends Groups) is the Council's key community partner. As such we are concerned that the Council should have the right approach and commitment to our increasingly important green spaces.

Hence we set out 8 points for your response.

1. The Forum fully supports the Council's 'in-house' Parks Service and its hard-working and dedicated workers and office-based staff. We call on the Council to continue to back it and praise it, not undermine it or consider privatisation of any kind.

2. The Forum opposes the underfunding of the above Service (in 2010 in the lowest quintile of all London Boroughs, and further slashed by 50% in 2011/12) and calls for additional resources to be put in so that all its public parks and green spaces can be managed and maintained effectively. We do not want to see the current slide into crisis continue [See Appendices B and C below] - it has taken 15 years of colossal and collective effort by the community and Parks Service to rescue and turn around our green spaces after the crisis caused by the savage cuts 20-30 years earlier in the 1980s.

3. Certainly the further cuts threatened to the Parks Budget should be abandoned.

4. The ring-fenced annual capital 'match' funding from Haringey Council for the management and maintenance of the Heritage Lottery Fund projects (Finsbury, Markfield and Lordship) clearly should not continue to come from the seriously underfunded Parks Service budget. This is an unfair and discriminatory practice leaving little left for all the other green spaces. [See details in Appendix A, below, from the Head of Client services]. The outstanding amounts and any future match funding should come from other capital resources. This is a contractual matter which can be remedied simply by drawing on the Council's capital or contingency funding. 

5. The Forum opposes increased numbers/lengths of major Commercial Events in Finsbury Park - such events often take a week to set up and remove, and dominate what should be a public space during much of the key summer months. Notwithstanding that, any money generated by such 'sacrificial' commercial activities in Haringey's parks should be ring-fenced as additional funding for parks and not used as an excuse to further cut the annual budget for the Parks Service.

6. The Forum supports the Council's policy that all our local public green spaces be managed and maintained to Green Flag Award minimum standards, as any community would expect. Over 60% of the key sites are yet to achieve that standard.

7. With an ever-increasing population in Haringey, we call on the Council to implement their policy of addressing existing deficiency of access to public open space, as well as ensuring protection of green space and the establishment of additional parks and public green space in all areas affected by development.

8. We recognise that the growing crisis for Haringey's green spaces is mirrored throughout many other areas of the UK, and that the responsibility to remedy this also lies at the national level.  We call on the Council to demand that the next Government after the General Election in May, whatever its complexion... 

- hold a national inquiry into the funding and management of the UK's green spaces

- bring in a statutory duty to monitor and manage these spaces to Green Flag Award standard

- ensure adequate public resources for all green spaces 

We call on the leaders of both Parties with Councillors, and the individual Councillors, to respond to these 8 specific points.

As the Council's key community partner, we continue to pledge to work in partnership with our fantastic but under-resourced Parks Service and to support our green spaces to the best of our ability through the wide range of activities of local Friends Groups. 

sincerely

Joan Curtis

Secretary, Haringey Friends of Parks Forum

Supported by the Haringey Federation of Residents Associations

Appendix A

Re: Heritage Lottery Funding commitments

19 January 2015

Dear All, 

Just to add to Andy Briggs explanation of the situation a couple of observations. 

The council has made a legal commitment to maintain each of the HLF parks in accordance with the agreed management plan for each park for a period of 10 years. This obligation is used to increase the council match funding contribution and therefore allows the HLF to increase the amount it is able to fund for the capital works. Therefore the council is in effect paying off its match funding over that ten year period. 

Andy is correct that there is only one parks budget and therefore in the event that either our current proposals are not accepted or that the proposals don't bring forward the required saving amounts the council would have to look to reducing the core parks budget further. 

Because of the legal position around the HLF funding, savings would have to be made in other parks first and therefore those savings would be far harsher because money couldn't be taken from the three HLF parks until such time that the 10 year post completion period expired. The package of measures that you see in the consultation are there to avoid any such reduction in other parks. 

I fully appreciate that some of them are difficult to accept or even tolerate, but having sat in other meetings recently and heard about how people's daily lives will be affected there are much worse decisions being made by the council at this time. 

I very much want to lead a Parks Department which is thriving and not to be presiding over a declining service. The work of the forum and the individual friends groups is invaluable and we fully appreciate all that you do. If you haven't seen this recent blog about the transformation of Coldfall Wood and the work of the friends over the last decade or so it's worth a read and it very nicely illustrates what we can achieve together. http://bugwomanlondon.com/2015/01/1 

Kind regards 

Simon 

Simon Farrow - Head of Client Services 

Appendix B

Haringey Friends of Parks Forum

Extracts from letter to all Councillors, Feb 2011

THE IMPACT OF THE PROPOSALS   

We explained that these proposals would greatly damage green spaces and return many if not most of them to the state of neglect they fell into in the 1980s when green space budgets were similarly cut. In the early 1980s there were 300 parks staff, and now there are only 60 (of which a substantial % are engaged in working on the Homes for Haringey housing estates - a protected contract). A workforce of 60 staff, as hard-working as they are, is less than the bare minimum for operational viability. This below-minimum staffing level is only able to operate by being bolstered by an active policy team (raising and managing crucial extra money from outside sources for essential capital works and regeneration efforts for the many run down spaces), additional 'parkforce' on-site stewarding, the very popular and vital BTCV community engagement workers, and a very useful safer parks team. All are facing serious cuts. 

We believe that such cuts would be a disaster and are therefore unacceptable. Its not just that green spaces will inevitably be poorly maintained and managed, but they would be in grave danger of becoming 'problem' spaces with negative implications and actually a long term drain on resources. To ensure green spaces are safe necessitates minimum levels of full-time dedicated and trained staffing. We believe it is madness and counter-productive to cut resources to Haringey's parks.

Note: We are quite aware of the value of all the other public services facing cuts, and as a Forum we have taken a principled decision not to compete with any other services or user groups, but to work alongside them. However, we will continue to speak out strongly about our green spaces, and to insist, lobby and campaign for the resources needed. We call on you to stand alongside the communities you claim to serve in demanding adequate Government funding for Haringey.

Appendix C

Haringey Friends of Parks Forum

Extracts from the Letter to Councillors - November 2012

Friends Survey

At the Parks Forum meeting we decided to send a Questionnaire to all Friends Groups. The initial results [based on a 32% response rate] indicate

1.  there has been a real decline in the short time since the April 2011 budget cuts (except where additional funding has been secured for a particular park)

2.  strong support for the need for additional resources

3.  greatly value the work and efforts of the parks service ground staff and office staff

4.  indicate that Friends' volunteering makes a very small contribution to the ongoing day to day maintenance needed throughout the borough. 

The experience of the 1990s shows that green spaces go into serious decline - and become problem spaces rather than the fantastic community resource they should be - if adequate staffing and maintenance is not ensured. It then takes a colossal and very expensive effort to rescue them. 

Hence adequate resources need to be ensured.

In announcing the Review in November, the Leisure Services Head of Operations, Andy Briggs, stated: "As you will be aware, 18 months ago the Council implemented a programme of budget reductions that have had a significant impact on our ability to maintain the expected standard of grounds maintenance across our parks and open spaces.  In responding to the budget reductions a number of initiatives have commenced. These include promoting further volunteering and local involvement in our parks, as well as working with our partners to secure external money to support the maintenance of our parks and open spaces. Whilst progress is being made, it is clear that such initiatives will not in themselves address the shortfall in resourcing ..."

Background   

In 2008 the Council committed to the 'Parkforce' organisational model and partnership - for 'a partnership approach [between the Parks Service, Friends Groups, BTCV and the Met Police] resulting in on-site staff dedicated to caring for every significant urban park during daylight hours'. The 4 key partners, including ourselves from the Haringey Friends of Parks Forum, publicly signed up to this together. Haringey's parks budget was at that time in the lowest quintile (20%) of Council budgets for comparable Councils, and remained so until April 2011. In April 2011 the budget was cut 50%, virtually the highest cuts made to any parks service in the UK.  The Council's Leisure Services has recognised that this serious under-funding has lead to major maintenance and management problems, and that any volunteering by the Friends Groups (where they exist and have the time) could not replace adequate staffing levels.