16
Examination of witnesses
Steph Wetherell, Dr Jill Edmondson and Dr Deborah Burn.
Q173 The Chair: Thank you for taking the time to join the committee. I hope that we will not be too aggressive this morning. I will start with the first question. When you answer, please say who you are and what your organisation does. What is the role and value of urban horticulture for food production?
Dr Jill Edmondson: I am from the School of Biosciences and a member of the Institute for Sustainable Food at the University of Sheffield.
On the role of urban horticulture in our society, it provides a hugely important, but at the moment relatively small, contribution to the food security of the urban population. It could do a lot more, but that role has changed over time. We have lost land that, historically, we have used for urban horticulture, particularly allotment land from the peak provisions of the 1950s.
When we talk about urban horticultural land and allotment land, we should not just view it as space that we use for food production; we should view it for the value it provides to urban communities in health and well-being. For example, research that we have done at Sheffield has shown that allotment holders typically eat 6.5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. That is 70% higher than the national average in the UK. That is one added value.
There is the exercise value that people get from practising growing food, a sense of community, and there are the environmental benefits that we must think about as well. For example, in that urban horticultural land, there are pollinator biodiversity hotspots in the urban landscape, which are managed in a hugely sustainable way. They produce food, but in a very environmentally sustainable way with the added values to urban communities.
Dr Deborah Burn: I am the research and development officer at the National Allotment Society and I will talk specifically about allotments.
Allotments provide access to locally produced food and are part of networks of local food producers. They educate about food provenance, both on the allotment site and to local communities and wider society. They contribute to food security and food sovereignty. I could also list the human benefits that allotments should be valued for, which includes improved mental and physical health. However, gardeners and their families and their visitors tell us that it is the totality of the allotment experience that is important and unique to allotments. For example, if someone gets an allotment because they want to grow food, they report back later that there are unexpected additional benefits such as tranquillity, relaxation, a different pace of life, new friendships and social experiences that they do not get elsewhere.
Allotments also provide a continuation of deeply skilled local horticultural practices, such as by-hand tilling of the soil, which are part of the UK’s heritage of skills and food production, whether it is a pea seed that has been handed down through generations or a giant leek grown for a competition as part of an ultra-local practice and tradition. Allotments perform physical and cultural ecosystem services such as carbon sinks, biodiversity and direct human contact with nature. They are part of green corridors and interconnected networks of green spaces and also have amenity value. We believe that their value goes way beyond just food production.
The Chair: I should declare an interest. I got a hernia digging my wife’s allotment.
Steph Wetherell: I am from Bristol Food Producers, which has a group of members who are local growers and farmers in and around Bristol. We work on access to land, markets and training for commercial market gardeners.
I will talk a little bit about the more business-focused urban growing. There is such a huge potential. There is what is currently happening and then there is the potential for what could happen. Historically, Bristol had a market gardening quarter. For anyone who has been to Bristol, the area by the M32 is grade 1 agricultural land, which is historically what fed the city. It has slowly been eaten away in development, but there are still thriving farms in the city. We have operations that supply around 90 to 100 households off one piece of land. That provides hyper-locally produced, nutritious, often culturally appropriate food. It also provides jobs and training, specifically jobs in the local regional economy. That type of market-gardening production produces far more jobs per tonne than field-scale growing outside the urban area.
Most of the urban growing projects also have a hugely strong community arm to them. One of our projects in Bristol works with refugees and asylum seekers who were involved in food production where they were from. Other projects just encourage lots of volunteering from their local community and can be specific to their locality. There is an operation growing on one acre— so not a huge piece of land—in quite an economically deprived area in south Bristol, which is working to meet the needs of the local community. They are growing fresh vegetables for their local food bank, but they are also growing veg boxes for that really specific hyper-local community and getting people volunteering on the site.
It is all about connecting people with where their food comes from. In urban areas there is a huge disconnection: people go to a supermarket to buy their food, but they do not know what is in season or where it has come from. Urban horticulture enables people to understand, see, experience and help out with where their food is coming from. The kind of growing that our members do is incredibly biodiverse. It is looking after and building the soils. You can walk in a park in Bristol and not see a huge amount of wildlife and then go to one of the local market gardens where it is thriving. There are insects everywhere, birds and small mammals. It is not an either/or; it is not, “Let’s rewild some parts of the city”. It is a question of how to bring that into our food growing.
Q174 Lord Sahota: My first question is to Steph. It is a quite wide-ranging question about accessibility of urban horticultural spaces and green spaces for people of all backgrounds and all walks of life. Around the country, accessibility and availability of space is not always the same—whether it is in London or outside of it. I am thinking about accessibility of green spaces for maybe deprived communities and minority communities. I have a local authority background. The councils are always putting in funding, trying to make these green spaces accessible to all the authorities, and the Government put a great deal of money into as well—recently anyway. How do you close all these gaps around the country and for all these communities? To save me coming back with a second question, I asked all the questions at once. Over to you.
Steph Wetherell: It is a lot more accessible to people than rural farming and rural growing. Because of the proximity to centres of diversity and some of the urban centres of deprivation, I am seeing, especially in London, some amazing community-led projects and people taking ownership. There is amazing work going on at OrganicLea, Black Rootz, with some black-led growing projects based out of there. There is a real opportunity for people to step into that. In Bristol, we have a large number of Jamaican Caribbean people and there is a huge community of them on allotments.
What I do not see is a scaling-up from allotment or backyard growing into people pursuing it as a job or a career. Generally, especially in the market garden, urban horticulture size and scale of growing, there is very little training and very little support for training. I think that is a huge barrier to people being able to do it. Again, I refer to OrganicLea, which has taken the City & Guilds training and is teaching organic agroecological horticulture through that and has been able to access draw-down funding. Through that, it has seen a huge diversity of people getting involved and starting to move through to making a career in food production.
There is definitely more diversity in urban growing. Farming as a career, for example, is the least diverse of all of the jobs that you can go into. Urban growing is definitely more diverse, but there are still barriers there. The difficulty is in finding the routes in and a lot of people end up leaving the city to go and train rurally, which is not an option that everyone feels comfortable with or is available to everybody.
Thinking about working in areas of deprivation, there are some brilliant projects in Bristol, such as Heart of BS13 and Lush Greens, which are working specifically, and are embedded, within the communities; they are really successfully getting people involved in growing projects. That is positive.
Lord Sahota: Dr Burn, anything on allotments, your speciality?
Dr Deborah Burn: My general answer, before I go into specifics, is that it is not very accessible at present. Economically, rents and administrative charges are pricing people out of allotments. I will quote a couple of figures: St Helens Borough Council charges £112.50 to rent the plot, £27.50 for water, a £100 administration fee to start a new tenancy, plus a refundable key deposit of £20, which is a £260 payment up front at the start of the tenancy. Many councils have either introduced or are thinking about introducing a non-refundable administration fee, or they have removed rent concessions for people on benefits, or they have increased their deposit. Briercliffe Parish Council, for example, now charges a £200 deposit up front. I should add that most councils do not offer a monthly direct debit payment for allotment rent, so people have to pay that up front.
Councils tell us that they need to be become cost neutral following budget cuts and that that is the reason why they are increasing rents. The introduction of administration fees concerns us. The setting of a fair rent is covered by the Allotments Acts, but an administration fee is not. Additionally, when it comes to benchmarking an appropriate rent, we see evidence that some councils are picking and choosing which other councils to benchmark against and often this is in favour of councils with higher rents locally. We are concerned that the economically poorest in our society are no longer able to access allotments to grow local food.
Waiting lists continue to be long and have been since the mid-2000s with little abatement. This is not just about the Covid pandemic; it was there already. Although there is clearly stated demand, there is also latent demand. Many people would love to access an allotment but they tell us that they know they have so little chance of doing so that they do not bother to sign up at all. I should add that waiting lists are inherently unreliable and do not give a true picture of demand, nor do they permit calculated responses to that actual demand. In particular, people living in rented accommodation are compromised by the waiting lists. The length of the waiting list plus a precarious domestic tenancy can mean that people take a long time to get to the top of the waiting list but may have left the area because they have left their domestic tenancy by the time they get to the top of the waiting list. We find that younger people are no longer younger people when they get to the top of the list.
We are also seeing more stringent management of tenancies, which concerns us with regard to people with physical and mental health issues. We see some councils wanting to clear waiting lists and avoid negative publicity around their waiting list, so they are perhaps less tolerant of people who might be struggling to maintain their allotment.
We also see issues around accessibility to land. We hear from many groups of local residents who want to set up new allotment sites and who, with our support, are more than able to do so. However, they cannot get access to land. Often they cannot find out who owns land and, when they can find out, it cannot be released for allotments, for a variety of reasons. We also hear similarly from local councils in circumstances; in circumstances where they desire to set up new allotment sites, they too have difficulty finding, purchasing or leasing land.
We continue also to see allotments threatened by development and, increasingly, we see private providers of allotments who are looking to achieve the hope value of their land and, therefore, want to dispose of the allotment site. Unfortunately, we still see that some councils are reluctant to create allotments or do not wish to look for land for more allotments. For example, a senior planner in an urban authority recently told me that, “We are having no more allotments. We do not want any more allotments” and, like all urban councils, that authority has a very high waiting list. Even though there may be a policy or an allotment strategy in place, it does not necessarily mean that that is what is happening on the ground.
Following on from what was mentioned earlier about widening participation, the allotment waiting list is open on a first-come, first-served basis and does not discriminate. Prior to the increase in demand, there were some excellent examples of projects on allotment sites that encouraged people from a wider diversity of backgrounds and cultures to get involved in allotment gardening. They were effective: people would join a project and then they could rent a plot on the same site. However, demand is so high that they will not now be able to move to plots of their own.
Finally, I mention skill again. We see very low ability in skills for horticultural practices and many people simply give up because expectations are higher than the reality. These are all barriers to people who want allotments.
Lord Sahota: Thank you. Do you want to add anything, Dr Edmondson? Short and sharp.
Dr Jill Edmondson: I come at allotments from a slightly different perspective. We are research based and my research focus is on urban horticultural production. The key thing is that we have mapped allotments changes over time. We had peak provision of allotment land in the 1950s and, since then, we have lost 60% of our allotment land across the UK. We found that, interestingly, there had been an eight times greater loss in deprived communities in urban areas—where, potentially, there is more need for such land in order to access to fresh fruit and vegetables through growing, as well as for the multiple benefits that you get from participating in growing food. Particularly key is that, often in those deprived communities, people do not have access to their own green spaces; they do not have gardens where they can make decision to grow food. That loss is key and, when we are thinking about the expansion of either allotment land or urban horticultural land, we need to do it with equity in mind and think about where, how and why we are providing that land.
We have been running projects in Sheffield, working within some of those communities and with local food organisations to provide grow kits for people who have never grown food before—to come back to skills—and who may be food insecure. They can be responsive to the land that they have available, even growing five different crops inside or in the small space that they have, to start to look at what the barriers to growing food are for those people. A key one is access to land, but work that we have done over the past year has shown that the other big thing is the skills that they need to practise growing.
Q175 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: I should say that I have a much-loved allotment and a lot of what you have been saying resonates very much with my experience as well.
My question is: how can we encourage urban gardeners, allotment holders and so on to garden in a more environmentally friendly way? It seems very piecemeal. Some people are very passionate about it and very sensitive about issues such as not using plastic or peat, water conservation and other important issues. However, that is certainly not as widespread as we would like it to be. How can we spread that message to make growing environmentally a more universal experience in the urban area as well as tackling the food security issues? Deborah, do you want to kick off?
Dr Deborah Burn: Thank you, yes. We can certainly see that allotment gardeners have positively adapted practices towards environmentally friendly gardening. We have seen a real increase in that in the last few years, particularly in the reduction of pesticide use and the adoption of peat-free compost, before the legislation takes effect.
We have concerns in two areas where we think that support would be useful. Our members tell us that the quality and standard of peat-free compost is variable and, at times, low. We would like to see some improvement. In particular, some of the better quality peat-free compost is expensive; it can be £15 to £18 for 40 litres, which is quite significant and can price people down to the lower-quality end of the market, and then they struggle to grow. Newcomers in particular find peat-free compost challenging and we think some education is needed. We can do that to a certain extent, but we think that there needs to be some financial and practical support from manufacturers, although we appreciate that they have put a lot of R&D into their products.
Secondly, and it is something you mentioned, like many consumers, allotment gardeners want to reduce their plastic use—found in plant pots, seed trays and other gardening sundries—but the horticultural sector is perhaps slower than other sectors to respond compared with other markets. We would like to see more research and development in that area, and we would be happy to get involved in that and be consulted.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Do either of the others want to add anything?
Dr Jill Edmondson: We have run national-scale research projects in allotments across the UK working with growers to understand their management practices—soil management and cropping practices—and to look at the diversity of management. One thing to take away from that—you have alluded to it—is that, in general, if compared with commercial horticulture, for example, allotment growers manage their soils in an incredibly sustainable way. We have looked, for example, at carbon storage within urban horticultural soils and compared that with agricultural soils, and it is significantly better. That is driven by the management practices that allotment holders, in particular, and other urban growers are using, including regular use of recommended management practices such as renewal and compost, rather than an overreliance on synthetic fertilisers.
As you have mentioned, however, there are examples of not so great practice, which is partly because there is no regulation around growing within urban areas and urban spaces. I am not necessarily suggesting that there should be, but I think producing a framework for sustainable soil management in urban systems, particularly urban horticulture, and cropping practices to bring in the biodiversity associated with allotments could provide an important mechanism if we are going to support the expansion of urban horticultural land in a sustainable and positive way.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: I think that we need some evidence for urban growers that, if you grow in an environmentally friendly way, particularly with the soils, you will probably get better food as a result. You get better carrots if you grow in good soil than if you use artificial fertilisers and so on.
Dr Jill Edmondson: We have the evidence to support that. That has been our aim over the last 10 years and we can provide numbers to support that. We have looked at the yields that allotment holders get across the UK, as well as at the nutritional value of crops. There are a lot of research groups doing that kind of thing, so there is the evidence base to support that kind of framework.
Steph Wetherell: I just add that, at the urban-farm scale, it is about training. The new generation of people coming into that kind of growing are passionate and are pretty environmentally minded in how they are doing it, but there is no training provision for that. A lot of it is happening informally at the moment through peer-to-peer networks and organisations such as the Landworkers’ Alliance, Organic Growers Alliance and CSA Network. This is largely unfunded; there is a lot of informal knowledge exchange, but there is the potential for what could be done with more investment in training.
Q176 Lord Watson of Wyre Forest: Dr Edmondson, how can urban food cultivation support resilience in the food supply chain?
Dr Jill Edmondson: As I have just mentioned, we have run a project over the last five years looking at yields within urban horticulture. The aim was to be able to provide some numbers to support this kind of question. We have also worked across the UK to map and look at what people are growing so that we can know what areas of land people use when they grow food for different crops and what their yields are. We have also looked at the land currently being used for growing food in allotments, because they are the only available national datasets on food production in urban areas.
Some land within our cities and towns is potentially available. This is not land that currently has trees on it—we do not want to remove trees; we know they are hugely valuable—or land that is used for things such nature reserves. At the moment, in a typical city like Sheffield, allotment land is probably feeding about 3% of the population on a five-a-day diet. If you map, within the green space that exists across the city, the potential land that could be used for growing food and put those yields in, you could feed 122% of the population on a five-a-day diet. That is absolutely not to say that all that land should be used for food production—it should not—and half of that land is in people’s gardens. However, if you think about potentially shifting 10% of that land into food production, both in gardens and within public green spaces in the form of community gardens, allotments or market gardens, you could feed about 15% of Sheffield’s population on its five-a-day diet. That is not a small contribution; it is a big contribution.
If you scaled that up across urban areas in the UK, you would start to see that it is a really important contribution to resilience. That is particularly important in the context of the commercial horticultural sector. We grow just over 50% of the vegetables we eat and under 20% of the fruit we eat domestically within the UK, but we do that in a generally quite unsustainable way and we do it on our grade 1 agricultural land, which is now experiencing quite widespread degradation. Take, for example, the Fenlands in the UK: half of our vegetables are produced there, but we are losing nearly a centimetre of soil from that system every year because it was formerly peatland.
We need to think about how we can shift some of our production into different areas—urban areas are one option for that—and do so in a sustainable way. To put some numbers on that, in Sheffield, the amount of green land potentially available for growing food is 97 square metres per person. At a UK scale, 23 square metres of land per person is used for growing our fruit and veg. That starts to show you that it would not be a small contribution. We should be thinking about this as an option for increasing our resilience and supply.
Lord Watson of Wyre Forest: There is an essential logic to your argument there. Can you help the committee to understand what the barriers are to achieving that goal or what the possible incentives could be?
Dr Jill Edmondson: There are clearly barriers to expanding growing food in cities and towns, but there are also big opportunities. Let us think about the challenge that we have had over the last couple of years with harvesting our horticultural crops in rural areas: we cannot get the seasonal labour to come and harvest those crops, and people in the UK do not have the skills or are not collocated with food production—84% of our population live in urban areas. At present, we do not value horticultural skills in this country as we should. That is a key message that I think we have come back to on every single point that you have asked us.
We do not have the skills and the knowledge at the moment to make the transition to food production in our cities and towns at a bigger scale. We can expand it, definitely, with the people who are interested now, but if we teach people how to grow and reconnect people with food production, there would be an opportunity to expand it. Land is another key barrier, but one of the biggest barriers is knowledge and skills.
Q177 Lord Watson of Wyre Forest: I was alarmed to hear about the costs of entering into an allotment contract with a local authority. Clearly, that is a barrier. Would you say that perhaps working-class people are being priced out of allotments and it is becoming a middle-class pursuit or am I taking that argument too far?
Dr Jill Edmondson: I do not think that you are. That is evidenced by the loss of allotment land that we have seen since the 1950s. We have lost the land in deprived communities. That partly reflects where there has not been a demand for allotments in the past, but it reflects a change that happened a long time ago, not the demand that exists today.
Q178 Lord Watson of Wyre Forest: I have one more quick question. Do you think that the rules for surplus fruit and vegetables produced on allotments could be loosened so that people could sell their surplus? Could that be an incentive for more people to join allotments or is that against the ethos of the allotment movement?
Dr Jill Edmondson: I do not think that there is an issue with incentives for people to join allotments. The land is not available. Waiting lists are huge now—I probably will not get one until I am retired. I do not think incentives are an issue.
One interesting thing about allotments is that they feed surplus into an important informal network of food provision. For example, at my parents’ allotment in St Helen’s, when there are gluts they provide to a local food bank. That happens throughout the UK.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle: The moment may have passed, Chair, for my question on peat-free compost. I am happy to pose it if you think that it is still appropriate.
The Chair: Yes, please.
Q179 Lord Curry of Kirkharle: I understood from the comments made that there is no research being done into alternatives to peat. Is that correct?
Dr Deborah Burn: I cannot speak for the horticultural industry as regards what R&D it is undertaking. We would certainly hope that more R&D is undertaken. Our members tell us that they feel that the transition to peat-free compost has been somewhat rushed and that many of the peat-free composts that are available on the market are very dry and not sufficiently moisture retentive in the way that peat was. They also say that they find remnants of plastic because, quite often, it is municipal compost that has been resourced as peat-free compost for sale. We hear that some of the more expensive brands are much better but, at the lower end of the market, it seems as if there has been a rush to produce products without sufficient R&D.
Q180 The Chair: On the point about the time it takes to get an allotment, at my allotment it was 17 years at one point. Is there an average waiting time across the country?
Dr Jill Edmondson: Dr Burn might be better placed to answer that. It is quite difficult to get information about waiting lists and they do not necessarily represent demand. For example, in the work that we have done looking at loss of allotment land, we have also looked at where that allotment land was and whether, if we turned that back into allotment land, it would meet the demand from the waiting list. In five cities, we were able to access that data, but in the other cities we were not able to access that data. There is no national dataset, is there?
Dr Deborah Burn: No, there is not, unfortunately. There is no set method for keeping a waiting list either. It varies. Sometimes the management of the waiting list is farmed out to an allotment association. There may be people on more than one list. There is no model for how often a list is reviewed either. It is very sporadic, so we cannot draw any figures from it, other than to say that a lot of people want an allotment.
Q181 Baroness Fookes: We have already heard some criticism this morning of local councils in effect pricing people out of wanting to have an allotment. There is a certain edge to my question now. How effective is local government and, indeed, national planning policy in supporting urban horticulture?
Dr Deborah Burn: Thank you for that question. We think that it is effective, but only to a certain point. Two key problems intersect. The production of an allotment strategy by a council is voluntary, not mandatory. That results in strategies being produced sporadically across the UK and, therefore, there is no level playing field for strategies and policies, unfortunately. The National Planning Policy Framework includes allotments, but only from a health and community basis. It does not take into account that there are other benefits, which I mentioned earlier, in particular their contribution to biodiversity and ecosystem services.
That lack of a mandatory strategy results in sporadic practices and prevents connection with other policies. To give one example: with biodiversity net gain, it is not mandatory to consult the allotment strategy as part of an application for a development. A member of the public would need to request that the LPA examines the allotment strategy and it is up to the LPA as to whether it does that. That is on a development by development basis.
Steph Wetherell: For me, there are two major parts. One is around permitted development. Currently, if a site is over five hectares you do not need planning permission to put up agricultural buildings, but a lot of urban farms fall under five hectares. That means that to put up a polytunnel, a packing shed, a tool shed or any of those structures, there are a lot of hoops for people to jump through. That is a real barrier for the commercial farms that are operating in an urban setting. In looking at land-use classes and permitted development, being under five hectares is a key factor.
Bristol City Council has a lot of land but it does not have the resource to manage it effectively and there is no protection for the best land. There are obviously a lot of competing demands from housing and other development, but we have a beautiful piece of grade 1 land that keeps being threatened with park-and-rides. We have another farm where, due to rezoning of the green belt because of a road being built, part of the farm was at risk of having houses built on it. We must ensure that the highest-quality land for food growing in that urban environment is protected and that there are adequate budgets for local authority activity to support managing that land.
Dr Jill Edmondson: I will be quick because I agree with what both people have said. Allotments are relatively well supported once they are established, but fragility is a big issue. An allotment strategy is great, but what I think we really should be supporting is the production of strategies that reflect the breadth of urban horticulture. We should not just think of allotments on their own, but of that network of urban horticultural spaces. Providing support for those urban horticultural spaces is key so that, for example, they are not under short-term lease and we that we can enable people to put time and effort into getting things going. A joined-up strategy is what we need.
Baroness Fookes: It is all rather bitty at the moment.
Steph Wetherell: It is worth saying that Bristol is doing an allotment and food-growing strategy that covers its allotment land and its smallholding land under a single strategy. That will cover how land use is decided across those things. It will also include environmental guidelines for anybody who is renting land from the council.
Baroness Fookes: You would all want to have good, strong environmental criteria built into the various systems.
Steph Wetherell: If you are renting land to a commercial or community operation, I think the criteria should be embedded at a council level. It needs to serve the needs of that local community, local to where it is, as well.
Q182 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: I was going to ask a very quick question but we might have moved on slightly from it. I thought that the Allotments Act stopped councils from being able to build on it. Are they not preserved for ever under the Act? This number here of that we have lost—60% of allotment land—how can that be when I thought that they were all protected in some way?
Dr Deborah Burn: They are not all protected. There are three types of sites: statutory sites, which have protection; temporary sites, which are usually on land that will be used for cemeteries—both those types of allotments are provided by local councils, but only the statutory sites are protected—and then private allotment sites, which are provided by anybody else, basically, whether a commercial producer, on glebe land or some other former trust or coal board land. Only the statutory sites are protected. We are consulted on the disposal of those, so we do have figures for those. However, there is no protection for private sites and there are no figures about how many are lost.
On biodiversity net gain, we do have some significant concerns about the impact of net gain on private allotment sites. That is because biodiversity net gain is based on habitat, not land use. A private site could be lost, but replaced with anything else within the same habitat band; for example, a field of grass. We are quite concerned about that. Likewise, a private site could be lost and biodiversity credits could be purchased. Whichever habitat choice is chosen to replace that private site, it could be located anywhere else in England. We have concerns about private sites in particular.
Q183 The Earl of Arran: I think that we have already touched on this to quite some large extent, but how might biodiversity net gain impact urban growers?
Dr Deborah Burn: That is exactly what I have just answered, thank you, yes.
The Chair: Does anybody else want to comment?
Steph Wetherell: It is not my area of expertise but I have spoken to some of our local farmers and there is probably quite a lot of concern among some of the small-scale growers. The destruction of one established habitat is not equal to the creation of a new habitat. A lot of the nuance and the richness of things can be lost. As you said, the equivalence of stuff and the lack of locality of it is probably the biggest concern.
Dr Jill Edmondson: I think that my points have been covered.
Q184 Lord Colgrain: Could I ask a question that refers back to the previous question? Is there any evidence that when local councils have been selling their tenanted farmland they have been amenable to approaches from allotment organisations to allow some of that land to be used for allotments, provided that it is close enough to an urban area?
Steph Wetherell: It is not something that I have heard of. The problem is that, when it is sold off, the land has such a high market value that people are priced out of being able to do that—that is my experience of it. Even people trying to buy land in the urban or the peri-urban fringe for commercial food production are completely priced out. An acre of land went for £33,000 in Bristol—10 years ago, let us bear in mind— and it now has Christmas trees growing on it while someone waits for development to be allowed on it.
Lord Colgrain: The social benefits do not come into the equation at all.
Steph Wetherell: No.
Dr Jill Edmondson: We have all mentioned that, when we talk about urban horticulture, you have to value it beyond the food production value. Until we do that, it becomes very hard for a developer to justify turning over land for urban horticultural production. We have to recognise the multiple benefits that it provides.
Q185 Lord Colgrain: I will ask my real question in that case. Are you aware of any examples from the UK or overseas where successful green urban planning policies have been adopted?
Steph Wetherell: I would like to talk about Rosario in Argentina, which has a bit of a flagship urban agriculture programme. As it emerged from the financial crisis in 2001, and since then, it has grown to preserve over 700 hectares of agricultural land, produced 25,000 tonnes of fruit and vegetables every year and reduced greenhouse gas emissions for locally produced vegetables by 95%.
They mapped and took over vacant and underutilised land that could be used for farming. They set up a municipal agricultural land bank and offered tenancies to small-scale agro-ecological farmers. These are quite micro farms. We are not talking about people being on five or 10 acres; they are quite small plots, so the social impact from that on the city is that there are thousands of people who are now growing vegetables for themselves. The plots are probably a little bit larger than an allotment, but they are for sale as well.
They have also provided technical agricultural assistance programmes and trained the farmers in such things as food safety. It is a holistic whole-system approach of finding the land, providing training and supporting people with markets. They set up farmers’ markets, processing plants and home delivery schemes, and it has been hugely successful.
Dr Deborah Burn: In the UK and specifically on allotments, I draw attention to Worcester City Council. It has fully reviewed its allotment provision, management and strategy. We were involved in this and itt took on board all our recommendations. It has continued to retain its concessions on rent. The highest anyone would pay for a full plot would be around £70, which we believe is more economically manageable.
Internationally, we are a member of an international federation of national allotment organisations. That there is a little bit of protection for allotments in the UK is the envy of those other organisations. I should flag that up.
One has to be careful about comparing allotments with allotments in Europe in particular, because the model there is more around leisure gardening than food production—it would be a little bit like comparing apples with pears. In North America, for example, they have allotments but they call them community gardens. Around the world quite often what is functioning as an allotment is called a community garden. We need to take care in looking at those. People also quite often compare allotments in Cuba or Spain, particularly Barcelona. However, in their economic and allotment models respectively, that is again a little bit like comparing apples and pears.
We are hosting an international conference in Cambridge in August for all the national allotment organisations. If any members of the committee would like to come, they would be very welcome to join us on the site visits and the wider parts of the conference.
Dr Jill Edmondson: From a UK perspective, there is a very successful policy that was put in place as part of the Defra 25-year environment plan, where there was a push to plant more trees in urban areas. Where that push came, that has translated. A lot of my other research is about urban trees. We have seen a massive increase in urban tree cover and it is still going on now. It has involved local communities, local authorities and NGOs in those urban areas and has been really successful.
Another nice example of a successful policy specifically related to food production is in Singapore. There they are called allotments but they are essentially raised beds; they are 2.5 metre by 1 metre plots that people can lease as you would an allotment here. They reconnect the people of Singapore with food production. They are open for everyone to see. They are small areas of land that are provided to give people that experience and to reconnect them with growing food. They are hugely popular and successful.
Lord Colgrain: You talked about tree planting. Out of interest, how much tree planting has been done in allotments?
Dr Jill Edmondson: Allotment management can be different from site to site. In some allotments, you are not allowed to plant trees. In some places you are allowed to plant fruit trees but only small, miniature-stock fruit trees. Often in allotments, you will not find many trees.
Dr Deborah Burn: You sometimes see that allotment associations have a designated area where they will have a small orchard, which works quite well. They invite members of the local community to come in and join in the produce of that.
Q186 The Earl of Arran: Just before the closing question, if you have an allotment in a green-belt area, does that make it any more secure and less threatened by development?
Dr Deborah Burn: Allotments are not considered to be brownfield if that answers the question. They have the same level of protection that the green belt would have, yes. It does not matter where they are located. Whether they are located within or without the green belt, they have that same green-belt protection.
Q187 Lord Watson of Wyre Forest: Dr Edmondson, could I take you back to the resilience argument and increasing food production? Is there a role for school land in some of the arguments you make? Are there some practical measures that government could take to encourage that?
Dr Jill Edmondson: Absolutely. A key thing that we keep coming back to is having the skills and knowledge to generate a new generation of horticulturalists. Schools are key to that, so putting growing food and horticulture—and valuing horticulture—back into the curriculum is crucial to realise it.
Q188 Lord Sahota: Dr Burn, this is about something that happened 20 years ago. In our local authority, there was an allotment that was not used and we wanted to build a school on it. It was not within the council's power to “de-allotment” it and we had to go to the Government to get their permission. It was not used. There was something put in government legislation in the Second World War that in any allotment people could grow but a local authority could not have any authority to build something. Is that still the case?
Dr Deborah Burn: That would be an example of a statutory allotment site, which has to be called into the Secretary of State and upon which we are consulted. It does not necessarily mean that the allotment site cannot be developed. If it is the case that the site will be developed, there needs to be provision elsewhere—a replacement site, if you like.
Lord Sahota: Is it still the case that you have to come to the Government or the Minister?
Dr Deborah Burn: Yes, only if it is a statutory site. If it is temporary or private site, there is no protection at all, but there is a set procedure to go through.
Q189 Baroness Fookes: Because I am particularly interested in skills and qualifications, I am wondering if there is any scope for any short courses for people in allotments—self-help almost—that might supplement the more official qualifications that go on. Is there anything going on or could something go on?
Dr Deborah Burn: Yes, there are quite a lot of schemes on allotment sites that run in conjunction with the council. There are some lovely projects on allotment sites where people are mentored by a more experienced gardener when they come along. Sometimes that is informal; sometimes it is formal. There are also teaching projects on allotment sites. It would be useful if there were more resources to provide more of those and for people who are on the waiting list as well. Quite often, people have waited a long time but they have not had an opportunity to grow any skills. They arrive at the allotment site and find that it is very hard going, that they are not skilled. We would love to see more of that, yes.
Baroness Fookes: Could you perhaps have a mentoring scheme for people on the list?
Dr Deborah Burn: You could, yes. Some projects do that. They do include people on the waiting list as well, yes.
Q190 The Chair: I get to ask the last question, but first can I ask: what do you do about slugs? Sorry, that is rhetorical. If you could suggest one recommendation—the magic question—for government, what would it be?
Dr Deborah Burn: Our big ask would be to have the allotment strategy moved from optional to mandatory upon local councils and to include an identification of land within that strategy where the councils had a waiting list within the past 10 years, whether that is a strategy that is being reviewed or written from scratch. That would be our big ask.
Dr Jill Edmondson: Mine links to that, I think. It is about providing the land in an equitable place, so having policies at a local level that are supported by national policy to provide land in an equitable way across cities but, crucially, linking it to skills gained.
Steph Wetherell: Mine would be the removal of the five-hectare limit on the eligibility for farm subsidies because most urban farms are smaller than that and cannot access subsidies and support, and the permitted development that is linked to that five-hectare limit. It would be treating all farms equitably regardless of their size.
The Chair: That was very brief. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. That is the end of this committee session.
