22 April
Dear Councillor Rose Burley,
Thank you for your recent letter in support of your renewed candidacy as councillor for Bentley and Darlaston North. You may not remember me, but I rang you during the early stages of Covid regulations after Walsall Council had taken the decision to close cemeteries to visitors. I reached out to you because my mother was very upset about not being able to visit my grandfather’s grave, and you were highly empathetic and immediately pressed the council to arrive at a solution. I remain grateful for your care and intervention, and I am delighted you are running again as councillor.
Having read your letter, I applaud your manifesto priorities of tackling the cost of living crisis, supporting green adaptations and improving health and wellbeing outcomes for local residents. In line with these priorities, I’d also like to raise a couple of specific issues that are affecting our local communities.
First, as an enthusiastic allotmenteer, I believe that a part of the solution to rising food costs and broader food security concerns is to support more people to grow some of their food themselves. While we can’t all expect to become subsistence farmers, it is absolutely possible for many of us to grow meaningful amounts of fruits and vegetables in our own gardens, or else in community or allotment plots. The Dig for Victory campaign during WWII famously saw immense success in reducing Britain’s reliance on food imports, and by the end of the war, nearly 1.4m allotments were responsible for producing 1.3m tonnes of produce.
I sit on the committee of Wrexham Avenue Allotments Association in Walsall, and we have been trying fruitlessly for several years to get the access driveway to our council-owned allotment site resurfaced, as it is severely and dangerously degraded. When we could get a response from council officers at all, they simply told us that there is no money. The waiting lists for plots in the local area tell us that people absolutely want to grow their own food, no doubt for the host of benefits to their health and wellbeing, as well as to save money, but facilities and support to do that are lacking. If councils cannot even maintain existing allotment sites, what hope have we for meaningfully expanding provision to meet the growing demand we are seeing from local residents?
I recently wrote to the DEFRA minister, George Eustice, to urge a system-level change here. I proposed that we need to treat allotments and other urban spaces seriously as contributors to national food production. We need to empower people to produce food themselves and reduce their vulnerability to supermarket price hikes. In doing so, we will also see improvements in physical and mental health, in community cohesion, in carbon emissions and in biodiversity.
I realise that large changes in local authority budgeting need to be centrally driven by the government and that local councils largely have to work with what they are given. That is why I suggested to Mr. Eustice that an immediate measure would be to meaningfully increase local government funding for allotments and community garden schemes, to pay for overdue maintenance on existing sites and acquisition and conversion of land for new sites. This could be accompanied by a national strategy and dedicated officers to identify land for potential allotment use, promote a new Dig-for-Victory-inspired campaign for both private and community gardens, and provide resources in support of urban food production.
However, other systemic changes may be possible at a level that falls within the scope of council powers. For example, planning requirements could be set out for all new housing developments to include community growing space, and public buildings could create community roof gardens and terraces. However, there has also been evidence that the current, Conservative-led council has not always made the most sensible spending decisions with the money it does have. For instance, it made local news headlines for spending £20,000 on a handful of giant green plant pots, a move that our MP, Valerie Vaz, branded “absurd”. Reports like this do not inspire confidence that the council currently has its priorities right.
Second, your letter mentions combating fly tipping by focusing on hotspots and going after perpetrators, which is also very commendable and very much overdue. I fear, however, that we are facing a much wider problem with litter that goes beyond fly tipping. It feels like almost every street and every patch of green space in my local area is choked up with drinks cans and food packaging. There's an area of grass by the house where my grandparents lived and I clean it up often, but give it a couple of days and it's full of cans and bags of dog poo all over again. It really is very disheartening.
Despite central government launching a national litter strategy in 2017, I have seen no visible improvement locally and in fact the situation seems to get worse each year. While local government cuts can again take some of the blame for these declining standards of street cleanliness, we are clearly also dealing here with a cultural problem. Wouldn’t it be great if we could encourage people to stop littering in the first place? The Keep Britain Tidy campaign does just that, and has done so for decades, but the government withdrew its central grant in 2010, so the group now relies on other donations and can no longer fund things like the major TV advertising it used to undertake.
I recently wrote to the West Midlands mayor, Andy Street, to urge him to support changes at the regional and national level that include improvements to school curricula and the restoration of funding to Keep Britain Tidy. However, again, there is potential for the local council to play a key role here in encouraging civic responsibility. For example, the council could roll out an advertising campaign, which might encompass local radio, billboards and other formats, to discourage littering and encourage people to take pride in their local environment.
Being a little more creative, there could even be opportunities to create double and triple wins for the local environment, food security and health and wellbeing. I think there is real credence in the idea that people are more likely to take care of an environment that is higher quality to start with and that they feel they have a stake in. What if we were to set up a community gardening scheme with funding attached for people to apply for grants to beautify their local communities? This could include decorative planting as well as community food projects in shared spaces. I would have liked to have seen what a local community would have created with that £20,000 the council spent on giant plant pots. Such schemes would benefit community cohesion, encourage local pride and support wellbeing, discouraging littering in the process.
I have not forgotten your support at a difficult time and you certainly have my vote in the upcoming election. I wish you every success and I hope that if Labour does take control of the council, you will take into consideration these twin issues for the local environment, of allotment and grow-your-own support and a crackdown on the broad problem of littering in our area. Perhaps you may even find some of my suggestions helpful in working toward solutions. I’d be more than happy to be contacted to discuss such ideas further.
Many thanks and best wishes,
Christopher Crompton
Christopher Crompton