Child’s Hill Allotment Society
Increase in allotment rents
You might be aware that Barnet is proposing to increase allotment rents by about 200%, and possibly for some by 400%. The exact amount is not entirely clear, but it seemed originally that they wanted to charge Barnet residents £17 per pole and non-residents £34 per pole. The 50% discount for the first 10 poles of plots of over 60s was not mentioned, so it is assumed that it will remain.
When we heard of the proposals, we sent an email to all the members of Barnet’s Cabinet Resources Committee, which included the following.
“In the case of allotment rents it is hard to believe that a 200% increase represents a true reflection of the cost to the council of administering and maintaining its allotment estate, and must therefore be interpreted as a revenue raising exercise. Furthermore the excessive increase is in percentage terms much greater than those proposed for other council charges, so it would appear that allotment tenants are being singled out for special treatment. It is indeed quite probable that the proposed charges are illegal, since allotment rents are required by law to be reasonable and case law exists to the effect that a tripling of rents is unreasonable and that any increases should be in line with those for other council recreational services.”
Councillor Coleman replied as follows:
“We are currently subsidising allotments in the Borough to the tune of £100,000 a sum that the Barnet taxpayer can no longer afford.
Of course if you adopt the Council’s new policy and run your own affairs you can set whatever rent level you like and manage your own budget
I can confirm that increases will come into effect immediately”
On further checking, the figure of £100,000 was found to be not the current annual subsidy, but the amount by which the expenditure in the five years 2005 to 2009 exceeded rental income and that, in the two most recent years, rents slightly exceeded expenditure. So the allotment budget would appear already to be under control and hence there is no obvious justification for an increase in rents.
The reference to our running our own affairs is probably what lies at the heart of the proposed increases, since they are powerful inducement to us to move to a position where we can set our own rents.
Then there is the question of the timing. We all have tenancy agreements with the council, which are legal contracts, in which it says that 12 months notice of changes to rents must be given, and we all received letters from the council in March last year saying that the rent from April 2011 is to be £5.90 per pole, whether or not we live in Barnet.
So we asked Cllr Coleman to explain the question of the subsidy and to clarify the meaning of immediate, but no reply has yet been received. However when the council’s budget group met on January 14, it was confirmed that the new charges would come into effect in April 2012. Also the higher charges for non-residents had disappeared from the list, but no final decision on charges will be made until February 14.
Meanwhile the Federation is looking into ways of challenging the proposals on legal grounds.
It should be noted of course that if management were to be devolved to us by April 2011, we would be able to set our rents and the council’s proposed charges would be irrelevant.
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