Allotments need (From Malvern Gazette)

Allotments need

9:22am Monday 11th March 2013 in Letters

 I ATTENDED the last meeting of the town council on February 12, where there was a very interesting discussion among the town councillors on the subject of allotments, which I feel I should bring to the attention of readers.

I was surprised to hear that atleasttwo councillors were wanting the council to abandon plans to find a replacement site for the mothballed site at Elgar Avenue.

Two councillors suggested thatthe current provision of allotments would suffice to meet statutory obligations and basically all current and future applicants could simply be put on an evergrowing waiting list.

This seems to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding ofthe duty thattown councils have to provide allotments, which cannot be reduced to economic benefit alone.

Most allotment strategies quote the 1969 Thorpe Report which recommends a provision of 15 allotments per 1,000 population – for Malvern, this would be equivalentto 435 allotments.

We provide 110.

All this information came out through the very interesting and informative debate conducted by your councillors on this issue.

In the end there was a heartening majority in favour of continuing to search for suitable land to increase allotments provision to match demand.

WILLIAM JENKINS

Malvern