Time to bite the bullet: forget about making parks a statutory duty; the answer to our chronic underfunding problem has to be more radical

Green Places, March, 2009 by Alan Barber

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If there is one thing on which all park managers agree, it is that the money available to maintain urban parks and green spaces within local authorities is inadequate.

Worse, the majority of local authority managers have seen a steady reduction in their budgets over many years.

If you compare figures from the Audit Commission 1988 study 'The Competitive Management of Parks and Green Spaces' (1) with those of the National Audit Office report for 2006 'Enhancing Urban Greenspace' (2) you will discover a 35% drop in funding in real terms.

It is not, and never has been, national policy to reduce budgets for maintaining the nation's most popular public recreation provision.

No politician, national or local, has campaigned for such a reduction. Certainly, no electorate voted for it. So why has this happened when budgets for all other services either stayed pretty much in line with inflation, or increased significantly?

And why, more than six years after a government taskforce identified the problem, has no effective action been taken to correct it?

An easy target

The answer to the first question is that local authorities are obliged to give a priority to their statutory responsibilities.

If they are short of money to meet these obligations, the parks budget is an easy target for savings. Whitehall has piled on the statutory responsibilities in recent years.

This is in line with its determination to control every aspect of local spending and decision-making.

Forget the recent succession of trivial white papers. When it comes to 'communities in control' there is only one community in control, and it resides in Whitehall.

There is a widespread view that the answer to this problem is to make the provision and maintenance of parks and green spaces a statutory duty. This, some say, will level the playing field. Sorry, but it won't. In all the years I have been hearing this argument, I have never seen anyone compose the words that would need to be enshrined in law to make this happen. This is probably because it can't be done. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of the current statutory obligations with which the park budget is locked in such unfair competition year after year.

Making an example

Let's take two simple examples:

The government decides that all people over 60 are entitled to free bus travel anywhere in the UK. The government says it provides the money, but the local authorities say it is not enough to run the scheme.

My local council complains that it is over 1 million [pounds sterling] per annum out of pocket. That is 1 million [pounds sterling] extra to find from its budget, without raising council tax.

Then, towards the end of last year everyone was outraged by the murder of Baby P. Local authority social services departments were under the spotlight and the press reported an upsurge in children being taken into care. Taking children into care costs local councils money.

What do these two cases have in common? Firstly, these costs have to be found from a budget which is tightly restrained by Whitehall. Secondly, they have no real choice. These are statutory duties.

More worryingly, these two examples are dwarfed by the problem of the underfunding of local authority pension funds.

Most statutory duties are about meeting the entitlements of individual people. They are not about a universal provision like a public park. The idea that you can put public parks on the same footing as these statutory duties, doesn't work. How could such a concept ever be used to resist taking a vulnerable child into care, or paying pensions to retired staff? If all those other statutory duties remain, what protection do you think the parks budget will get?

Finding the answer

The answer to my second question is that solving the problem of falling revenue budgets for parks and green spaces is a tough call. Nevertheless, it is high time that we faced this challenge head on.

CABE Space should be in the lead, not least because their many other excellent initiatives will run out of steam if no solution is found to the most chronic problem.

Local authorities should achieve optimum benefit from their greenspace assets. In most towns and cities in the UK, you don't have to look far to see that they are not

Poor maintenance of such a large estate gives poor value, ie the value of benefits is reduced. You cannot claim great health benefits for public parks if people shun them because they are unkempt, lack facilities and are unattractive.

It is time we looked at radical solutions. Parks and green spaces should now be taken out of the local authority arena which condemns them to surviving on scraps left over from meeting statutory obligations

If a dedicated parks trust works for Milton Keynes, it can work for other places too (3). If it takes an endowment to kick things off, it would be worth the expenditure because parks repay investment. According to the Trust for Public Land's research for Philadelphia (4), each year the park system provides benefits around 100 times the value of the input.