Director of city management Leith Penny: "Local authorities need to adjust to the new finance realities.”
Westminster City Council has responded to accusations that it is scrapping its parks department, saying the service restructure will make “little or no difference to the day to day runnning of the park.”
A report in Horticulture Week suggested that parks services in the borough are under threat as the council introduces a new model for service provision in a bid to cut costs.
In addition to moving towards a ‘strategic commissioning’ model of structuring, the council is reported to have issued 500 vulnerability letters to staff, with official redundancies expected on 1 October and an estimated 200 people likely to go.
The council has neither confirmed or denied these figures but Westminster’s director of city management Leith Penny told GPN: “We are not scrapping the parks department.
“Our small but high quality parks team is part of a broader department that uses contractors to provide public realm services,” he explained. “The parks service has been outsourced for a long time now and the present agreement with Continental Landscapes is the fourth letting of the contract.”
Under the new structure, parks will be operated by managers responsible for a range of other contracts but, he said, in terms of the day to day running of the park “you shouldn’t see a difference".
“There might be one less person on the existing team but this is not a fundamental change in the way the service is run.”
But fears have spread across the sector that the Westminster model could be adopted by other councils and lead to a reduction in resources for parks across the country.
Penny said change is inevitable: “I don’t think any of us expects central government to put more money our way in the near future so local authorities need to adjust to the new finance realities.”
Alan Barber, parks consultant, disagrees, saying that justifying the re-organisation on financial grounds misses the point: “The strategic document itself is written in management-speak with no real regard for people, either those employed or those served. No vision for the borough is expressed and no outcomes set. It is basically managerial codswallop.
"I appreciate that local councils are in for a lean time, but that is no excuse for the kind of tosh expressed in this document. It mentions ‘delivery’ in every other sentence but still loses sight of the purpose of providing public parks, and using them to pursue broader economic, social and environmental goals."
Barber said that by moving parks out of ‘community services’ and into ‘procurement and contract support’, the Westminster strategy “takes us back to the dark ages when they were only seen as a maintenance burden."
He suggested: “There are better way for councils to save money but the government won’t let them. For example, many councils are wasting over £1million a year collecting green waste from householders which the householders could compost for themselves. They do it to meet government recycling targets so they do not incur a financial penalty.
“Parks and green spaces make an enormous return on their investment but these benefits do not return to the local council so, in our economically-illiterate and decidedly moribund system of governance, they tend to be seen as a burden rather than a huge public benefit. Westminster’s latest move is just one manifestation of this.”
• Read more from Alan Barber in the September issue of Green Places magazine as he joins an open forum debate on the future of the Green Flag Awards. Visit the Landscape Design Trust website to find out more about subscribing to Green Places.
