Park Lovers Step Up Campaign Against £1.1m Cuts In Haringey's Parks

Haringey's Friends Groups have launched the first ever ePetition on the Haringey Council website, to back up their ongoing paper petition.

They call on all residents to help get 2,200 signatures to force a full Council debate on 'unrealistic, irresponsible and destructive' cuts to staffing (46 posts) and budgets (£1.1m). Protest leaflets are being distributed in parks across the borough this week.

On Friday 13th May, reps of the Haringey Friends of Parks Forum held a 'crisis' meeting with the in-coming Cabinet Member for parks, Cllr Nilgun Canver, calling on her to intervene to prevent the threat of imminent cuts to staffing due to be decided at the Council's 'General Purposes Committee' on Thursday.

The Friends Groups plan a 'litter' protest on Sunday 22nd May to highlight increasing litter problems due to understaffing.
 
The Haringey Friends of Parks Forum are calling for cuts to our green spaces* to be reversed if they are not to be plunged into a serious decline in maintenance and management. The Forum believe the scale of cuts planned would make the department 'unviable' and send it 'into crisis'. In the last few weeks many groups have reported understaffing and maintenance problems, including a growing failure to provide adequate staff to clear litter. And this is before the Council's threat of 'deleting' further posts is carried out.**  Some local on-site staff depots are also controversially facing closure, or being leased out to Veolia for their street cleaning teams.

" Friends groups have worked hard over the last 10 years to rescue our vital green spaces from the sorry state they were left in due to cuts in the 1980s and 90s. We are not going to stand idly by and allow them to go to pot again. We are appealing to the Council to re-consider their position, and to reverse the unrealistic, irresponsible and destructive cuts to parks staffing and budgets. "  said a Friends Forum spokesperson

A Council plan to delete 46 posts from the parks department is being discussed on May 19th by the General Purposes Committee. The Friends Forum, having already circulated protest petition forms to Friends Groups have now launched the first ever ePetition on the Council's own website - and all residents are being encouraged to sign it there - you can reach it via this post on HOL

Refs:
 * 51% budget cuts (£1.1m cuts, including 'deletion' of 46 posts, almost all vital front-line staff). These massive and shocking cuts are in the top 6% of cuts to green space budgets around the UK (according to a March 2011 report by the GreenSpace charity), despite the existing budget having been for years only in the lowest quartile of the budgets for comparable London boroughs.
  ** This would be a total of around 1 in 3 jobs lost to a department that is already understaffed.