Examination of Witnesses (Questions 118
- 135)
TUESDAY 15 JUNE 1999
MS HELEN
PARTRIDGE, MR
ALAN BARBER
AND MR
NICK BURTON
Chairman
118. Could morning. Could I welcome you to the
Committee and ask you to introduce yourselves for the record.
(Ms Partridge) Helen Partridge. I am
the Director of Policy for the Institute of Leisure & Amenity
Management. I am a paid employee of the Institute and my role
is to develop and disseminate policy to our members. We have over
6,500 members from the leisure industry in its widest sense, the
all-embracing term of "leisure", including parks, open
spaces and the countryside. About a quarter of our membership
does come from that area -parks, open spaces and the countryside,
and I have a specialist panel to advise me in those areas. I have
with me today Nick Burton who is a founder member of the POSC
panel. He is currently the Director of Operations of the environmental
charity Groundwork Southwark; and he was previously Director of
the South Yorkshire Community Forest. He is soon to take up a
new appointment as Head of Southwark's Council Parks Service and
is moving into local government. The third member of our team
I probably do not need to introduce, it is Mr Alan Barber who
is the Institute's immediate past President and the current Chair
of our Parks, Open Spaces and Countryside Panel.[1]
Mr Brake
119. Is there such a thing as a "parks
profession" or, working in parks nowadays, do we just have
a series of contractors who chop the trees down and mow the grass?
(Mr Burton) Perhaps I could lead on that. Looking
at parks managers as professionals, particularly the management
side of things, perhaps we could take two examples focusing on
two particular professions: one is the landscape parks management
profession, and the other is the landscape architecture profession.
If you were to look at the life of a public park, the design and
construction (which tends to be headed up by the landscape architects)
may take about four to five years; that park may exist for 100,
200 or more years—it remains to be seen for a lot of these
parks. The design and construction could take maybe 20-50 per
cent. of the total lifetime expenditure of the budget, but that
expenditure will perhaps only be over 2 per cent of the park's
lifetime. Parks management, on the other hand, is about spending
up to about 80 per cent of the total funding on parks in what
is about 90 per cent of the park's life. Parks managers have custody
of a large number of very valuable assets, generally spending
quite modest amounts of money on each of those on an annual basis.
As I say, the design and construction is generally undertaken
by landscape architects, and that is usually on a contract basis.
On the other hand, the parks managers tend to work for local authorities
or other large organisations as permanent employees, and they
need to have a very broad range of skills. The landscape architects
tend to focus on design and plant issues—that is what they
are trained in; but as well as that, parks managers need to know
about sports, events management, public liaison, buildings management,
nature conservation, art, in fact all the functions that go on
inside a park. This is actually reflected in the membership of
the two relevant Institutes—that is, the Landscape Institute
for landscape architects, and ILAM being probably the principal
Institute for parks managers—and also in the way they are
run. For example, our membership is based around a collective
of practitioners of varying skills and experiences, but we aim
to provide them with information and advice, networking and training,
to actually help them achieve best value in managing the parks;
whereas the Landscape Institute is really based around quite an
easily defined set of professional practices and services, and
that is supported by a very clear professional qualification scheme;
and that results in what I would say are very good Chartered Landscape
Architects in this country. Both are professions and have professional
Institutes but landscape management and parks management is very
much broader and is much harder to define; and that is why you
may consider there is not a profession there. Maybe that is not
your impression. In fact the two Institutes co-operate quite well
both at an institutional level and also at an individual level
with people on the ground. We respect and recognise each other's
professions, in fact you can register with the Landscape Institute
as a landscape manager providing you take their professional practice
exam. There are courses in landscape design which have been going
for quite a long time, and since the mid-1980s there are degree
courses and masters courses in landscape management. I will hand
over to Alan but, to sum up, the profession does exist and there
are a large number of practitioners.
(Mr Barber) There is great virtue, Chairman, in having
people with a mix of skills responsible for managing parks, and
in fact a team of different skills is actually needed, however,
there are problems. There is no specific qualification, there
is no requirement by employers for a specific qualification, the
number of qualified landscape managers who are managing parks
is extraordinarily low in this country, and I think it also suffers
because most of the people involved in this are employed by local
authorities who seem to be rather poor at investing in the professional
development of their staff, certainly in this area if not in others.
It is also very male dominated. My own research of a year or so
ago looking at every middle and senior management job in parks
management which was advertised in the country showed that there
was only 4 per cent of females actually applying let alone appointed.
It is a very male-centric occupation in local authorities and
not well-supported, certainly from ILAM's point of view, in attendance
at continuing professional development courses and the like. So
we as an institute do our best to promote good practice but it
is not everybody that is listening.
120. We have heard from our previous witnesses
that there is quite a dire situation in relation to parks, do
you think there are any specific skills which need to be developed
to help manage or perhaps turn round parks, to reverse the process
of decline and start moving in the right direction?
(Mr Barber) I think one skill is advocacy because
I do not think advocacy comes naturally to people, in local authorities
anyway. I think also the availability of funding from the Heritage
Lottery Fund has shown that a lot of local authorities simply
do not possess the skills to be able to put together an application.
It is better if this comes from them than from us but we have
been looking at this closely, as many of our members are actually
involved in Lottery applications. The fact is it has taken on
many occasions the engagement of external professionals to be
able to produce a convincing application, and I think that alone
tells a story about the lack of skills; the lack of understanding
of parks within the ranks of local authorities.
(Mr Burton) One of the key areas which could be developed
very much to the help of urban parks is the function of the urban
park ranger. This is more or less replacing the kind of traditional
park-keeper who we had lost probably really before local government
reorganisation in the 1970s, and then through CCT we found that
was really the end of the park-keeper role. For some time the
general public have felt that a presence in the park is missing,
and forward thinking authorities—and I count my own authority,
Southwark, amongst those, with a very large, 60-strong urban park
ranger service—are very much following the Countryside Commission's
model of countryside rangers. These are now coming into the urban
parks and they have different skills and may have an interest
in wildlife. What we would like to encourage is a much more horticultural,
health-based, leisure-based, kind of qualification scheme which
would provide some kind of training for a group of urban park
rangers. ILAM are working towards that.
(Ms Partridge) That is almost the third profession
we missed out in the previous answer. There is an up and coming
profession of urban park rangers who do not have the support they
probably need to thrive. They are very poorly paid, they are at
the beginning of their career, they perhaps cannot afford to affiliate
at the level of, say, ILAM professional membership or attend the
kind of courses and expend their training budgets on the kind
of things we would like them to do, but it is another profession
which is coming through parks which needs more support.
Chairman
121. Do you not think there were actually some
very good, high quality park-keepers and their removal and replacement
by low quality, poor park rangers has been one of the most disastrous
things which has happened to parks?
(Ms Partridge) Yes, but things have changed somewhat
as well. We are talking about a different role for park-keepers
now. Instead of "Off the grass", we are trying to get
people onto the grass, so we are talking about community engagement
and bringing people in. So the impression you got from the old
park-keeper perhaps is not the one we want to portray in public
parks now.
122. They actually stopped a lot of the vandalism
though, did they not?
(Mr Barber) It is a very varied picture, Chairman,
but generally where parks have a resident in charge of the park—and
I suppose Battersea Park is quite near here and is an example
of a manager living in the lodge in the park—this is probably
the best arrangement. But there are a lot of young, keen park
rangers coming into the profession and where they are involved
in things like environmental education, enabling volunteers in
parks and so on, we think they are doing a very good job and ought
to get more support. Whether they are a complete substitute for
a park-keeper, I think is another kettle of fish, but certainly
the introduction of CCT saw local authorities concentrate on mobile
maintenance rather than having people in parks who the public
could visibly see and could be seen to have a proprietorial interest
in the park.
Mrs Ellman
123. Do you think the replacement of CCT by
Best Value, beacon councils and the introduction of new regional
structures will make any difference to the problems you have identified?
(Mr Barber) I think the jury will be out on Best Value
for some time and it is right that they are. There are a lot of
good things in Best Value, it seems to be making a lot of the
right noises, but we must remember that its prime role is to enable
the Government to keep a hold on local authority practice and
expenditure following the removal of CCT. It is not about greater
value in parks specifically or any other specific area. You have
to interpret this and I have a worry about interpreting Best Value
in parks. Just like the Local Government Association, ILAM (and
I think many other correspondents to this Committee) have stated
what they believe all the many benefits of parks to be—environmental,
social, economic and so on—but unless local authorities
have a measure of that value one does not know how they will be
seen to promote it and we still may well end up with CCT Mark
II, and if CCT was doing it cheap, Best Value is doing it cheaper.
Dr Whitehead
124. Can I take you back to the CCT regime,
particularly the leisure management or the parks and open space
management requirements of CCT? The proponents of CCT would say
that that process itself actually secured best value in terms
of what we have already heard this morning, about local authorities
not having enough revenue. In your evidence you have stated a
number of other factors which are rather less tangible and you
have mentioned already that seems to be a problem in terms of
Best Value. How would you reconcile those views and if you are
to get benefit, as you claim, from Best Value for parks maintenance,
how would you try and develop an understanding of those more intangible
elements?
(Mr Barber) I think it is important to remember that
CCT was applied in the Local Government Act to the maintenance
of grounds, so we are talking about what grounds maintenance contractors
do whether they are in-house or external, and certainly that got
cheaper; competition made it cheaper. The question of course is,
is grounds maintenance the actual service? In our evidence we
have said very clearly that to measure the value of a park by
how cheaply you can cut the grass is no more valid than measuring
the value of a concert hall by how cheaply you can paint it. At
the end of the day it is an expensive necessity and if you can
do it cheaper that is fine, but it is not the be all and end all,
even of maintenance. What we know from what the Heritage Lottery
Fund is discovering is that park lakes are silted up, drainage
is poor, soil fertility is down, as are a lot of other things
which do not readily make themselves available to contractors'
maintenance sheets. But this is to pigeon-hole the maintenance
of parks where what people want is a leisure and recreational
facility which is pleasing them, giving them enjoyment, and which
they can make visiting part of their lives. It seems to me that
local authorities during CCT have largely lost the plot in thinking
the job was to simply do the maintenance rather than to project
parks as part of the community resource that we have for people's
well-being, whether for health, for educational opportunities
or many other things. This was lost sight of and a lot of the
people's concentration, certainly that of managers, has been on
managing contracts for grounds maintenance.
125. But a supporter of CCT would say, I guess,
that part of the answer lies in the fact local authorities did
not put proper specifications in the tender documents and they
have paid the penalty of simply failing to think the thing out
properly. Are you saying that it would have been possible to do
that? If you are saying that, are you then saying that the intangibles
are so intangible, as it were, that one should simply say, "Let's
hope we can get it right somehow by putting in money in the right
way"?
(Mr Barber) I personally do not believe it is impossible.
If you can get to the moon using lowest contractors, you can certainly
manage a park. The issue is that local authorities have stuck
to the letter of the law and said, "If it is grounds maintenance
which must go out and nothing else, that is what we will do",
and that has produced an interface between a local authority as
a client manager, if you like, and what their direct service organisations
or private sector contractors actually do on the ground. An interesting
point here is that if you take leisure management, which was in
the same Act, where the contractor becomes responsible not only
for the leisure centre and its maintenance but the welfare and
the activity of the people in it, they get bonuses on the number
of people they get through the door, their satisfaction and indeed
the range of people they get. If you applied that principle to
parks, my guess is that you would have a very much better system,
but I do not know of any other local authority, with the possible
exception of Kensington and Chelsea with Holland Park, which has
actually taken that broader view of what contracting is. What
Best Value may be able to do is leapfrog that by encouraging local
authorities to look at the trust option, in other words we package
up the whole of the responsibility for parks and engage a trust
to do that. Obviously the local authority would have to provide
most of the funding but it would be a dedicated organisation which
would have to produce annual reports and targets, and it would
have to convince the population that their parks were being maintained
properly. It could not hide behind the very large, monolithic
organisations which local authorities are.
Mr Randall
126. Does your Institute differentiate between
parks and other urban green spaces?
(Mr Burton) Generally, no. On the face of it, it is
very easy to look at parks and open spaces and say, "There
is a great difference between them." Everyone can categorise
parks, you can think of a park or a common or a recreation ground,
real examples, and that is very easy to do, but in reality there
is a grade and blend between them. Park managers look after a
whole range of these—urban and country parks, commons, housing
estate land, playgrounds, urban woodlands, cemeteries, a whole
range of different areas—and often they are hard to define.
For example, Nunhead Cemetery, which is my local open space, if
you ask one person what it is, he will say, "It is a cemetery",
but if you ask another, he will say, "It is a nature reserve."
I think it has those dual functions and it is the park manager's
job to actually deal with how these spaces work and how they are
perceived by people in deciding what the management regime and
the use of the site should be. In terms of what we would say is
a crisis in parks, I think it is the medium to large urban parks,
the ones you can easily think of, which perhaps are most in crisis,
but these parks themselves do contain a whole range of different
landscapes anyway and some of the larger parks will have urban
woodland and nature reserve areas.
127. To what extent do you think the problems
facing urban and country parks are the same?
(Mr Barber) Perhaps the big difference between them
is, firstly, that designated local authority country parks are
much smaller in number, I think it is something like 250 in England
according to the Countryside Commission. Even though that is now
the Countryside Agency they have very much had the support of
that agency right the way through their existence, and in fact
the designation only came about because the Countryside Commission
wanted that identity. The problem I think, and one of the distinctions
of urban parks, is that they have not had that same kind of support,
so if you are wondering why it is that most of the evidence put
forward to this Committee is concentrating on urban parks, I think
that is probably by and large right, the much greater problem
is in cities. Indeed, if the countryside is to be saved from rampant
housing development by encouraging people to live in cities and
more residential accommodation in cities, it seems to me that
urban parks now need the kind of attention that the countryside
parks achieved at least in the first ten years of the Countryside
Commission's push on this, when they were giving a lot to support
local authorities with those particular responsibilities in a
way that urban parks have never enjoyed.
128. What specific lessons do you think we could
learn from other countries?
(Mr Barber) The first is that other countries do invest
in new parks. The Local Government Association referred to this
and if you look at what Paris has done, what Barcelona has done,
what Milan is doing, what Melbourne is doing, and various others,
if you look at successful international cities, you will see not
only do they not neglect their parks but they also invest in them.
In fact, to correct Chris Heinitz, it is not simply that Paris
makes the new parks part of its regeneration, it actually makes
them kick-start that regeneration. That is how the job is done
in Paris.
129. You have mentioned some specific examples
but they are all big cities, do other countries put that same
investment into small towns and small communities or is it just
the show pieces?
(Mr Barber) No, I do not think so, but there probably
is quite a distinction between the Mediterranean countries and
countries like Germany and France and indeed the United States
and Australia, where probably their urban settlements are more
generous with their green space, so we have probably more in common
with their character. But at the end of the day, the model of
the British park was a municipal and local government invention
and it has been exported to virtually every developed country
in the world and many of them are still using it as the key agent
of regeneration in their cities. This is something which now seems
to be almost completely lost on the British.
130. Do you know whether parks are run by local
authorities, or the equivalent, abroad?
(Mr Barber) Mainly they are, yes.
(Mr Burton) There was a time in this country when
we were looking very much from a strategic regeneration point
of view. To take Burgess Park, which is one of the parks I have
responsibility for on behalf of the Groundwork Trust, this was
proposed in the 1943 County of London Plan which was part of the
regeneration strategy for London. The area was created over 30
or 40 years by the demolition of buildings—2,500 buildings
were removed to make Burgess Park—yet the job has never
really been completed. It now just exists as a piece of urban
green space, it is called a park but it does not really function
as a park because there is very little in it. I would say that
a real opportunity has been missed to create something on a par
with what we would have in Barcelona or Paris right in the centre
of London, and we need to focus down on these opportunities. What
has happened with Burgess Park is that two bids were made for
Millennium Commission funding but it was not seen as high priority
because there was a lot of focus on riverside projects in Southwark—
131. Not seen as a high priority by whom?
(Mr Burton) By the Millennium Commission. We have
also been told by the Heritage Lottery Fund that there is very
little heritage value in Burgess Park because it is such a recent
park, but it has so much social heritage. There are 68,000 people
who live within 15 minutes' walking distance, and these are the
people who want to use Burgess Park but there is nothing for them
to do there.
Mr Brake
132. Still on the subject of urban parks, there
is going to be an Urban White paper, what should it say specifically
about urban parks? How should it promote urban parks?
(Mr Barber) I think the Urban White Paper is the opportunity,
if the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions
and the Secretary of State can be so persuaded, to actually build
a new body to oversee the development and management of urban
parks in Britain. If we could get something like that in that
White Paper proposal and bring that through to legislation, then
there would be a national agency which has an overview. As we
see it in ILAM, it is the only area of leisure and culture which
does not have such an agency, and I think that would be the biggest
single contribution which the White Paper could make.
Mr Donohoe
133. Do you not think there are just too many
parks and that is the problem for the local authorities? We heard
last week in evidence that there are some 3,500 parks in the UK,
which works out by simple arithmetic to mean there are some 55
per constituency. Well, it works out to me to be 55 anyway. Do
you not think there is a case, instead of having so many parks,
to reduce the number and have a higher quality?
(Mr Burton) I think you need to look at where the
parks are. The LGA made this point—are the parks in the
right area? One of the things we would encourage through ILAM
is that some kind of strategic approach is taken to the provision
of parks and open spaces on a borough by borough basis to ensure
the parks are in the right place. By and large, they were invented
to fulfil a need and, by and large, that need still exists. There
are open space standards which are often used—there is so
many acres of land per person and so on—and there is usually
a provision below those measures particularly in large areas of
urban land. So I would say that generally there is not a lack
of open space but we need to make sure it is in the right place.
(Mr Barber) What we do notice is that there is a huge
variation between local authorities and the amount of green space
that they have got and I think some strategic planning and overview
of how this contributes to the character of an area, to the economy
of an area, is very important. At the moment, all we seem to have
is extremely banal quantity yardsticks of provision and if you
listen to the Sports Council or the National Playing Fields Association,
and the DETR which parrots what they come out with, then you would
think we were still on the chase for more and more green space.
If, as I hope, you will be keen on the definition we have put
together for parks and open spaces in our evidence, and you feel
this is what it is all about, quite frankly you have to look at
a number of other measures of what is the right open space. You
have to remember, of course, there are a lot of towns and cities
in Britain, particularly in northern Britain, which have lost
huge amounts of their population. Ironically, we believe if you
want to re-populate those areas so as to make better use of their
infrastructure you have to use parks as one agent and we have
put that view forward.
You have argued in your evidence that we should
be creating a national agency, but surely we have got just too
many quangoes as it is, let alone adding to that. Surely you have
got a structure.
(Mr Burton) I think the Sports Council, for example,
has been a great advocate for sport in this country and, really,
one of the reasons for the decline in parks is that we have not
had that agency that is providing that advocacy role. It is about,
maybe, holding funding that could be distributed; it is, perhaps,
about providing training and best practice. Look at the plethora
of publications that come out from the Countryside Commission
and, indeed, the Forestry Commission which focus on recreation
in the countryside and recreation in woodlands. These are very
valuable in terms of information for people managing these assets.
We just do not have anything like that for the parks. ILAM fulfils
some of these functions, but we are a voluntary organisation.
(Mr Barber) I do not argue, Chairman, that our mode
of public administration is any better or any worse than that
in other countries where they do not have the great quangocracy
that Britain has. A lot of the national agencies that we are dealing
with, like English Heritage, the Countryside Commission and the
Sports Council, are all of a pretty similar vintage and they are
absolutely essential to the way in which things are administered
now in the area of local authority cultural and leisure facilities,
where there is no statutory obligation for the local authorities;
they act as a wonderful buffer for that. The Sports Council has
undertaken research and it has promoted a great many initiatives
which have supported local authorities. I am bound to disagree
with Councillor Heinitz, I think parks have suffered badly in
comparison with those other leisure facilities simply because
they have not had this support. If you have got a Museums and
Galleries Commission funded to £13 million a year by the
DCMS, who produces a registration and designation scheme, and
local authorities, for fear of losing grant opportunities, want
to maintain those, then that is where their priority expenditure
will go. You could apply that to parks, but nobody does.
134. You argue that there is a need for this
national agency, but you are not going to give it any teeth, are
you, if you are, at the same time, arguing against statutory responsibilities
being in place as far as local authorities are concerned for maintenance?
Surely, if you have a national body set up it has got to be given
teeth and these teeth have got to be, in part, statutory obligations
on the part of whoever is dealing with them. You cannot be arguing
on the one hand for some national organisation if it has not got
any teeth.
(Mr Barber) I think we would be making a distinction
between the statutory responsibilities that a new Urban White
Paper would propose for a national green space agency and the
idea of putting a statutory responsibility on local authorities
directly. The latter, I know, is argued strongly by both sides,
but, at the end of the day, I think we ought to remember that
this great heritage of ours of public parks was created by local
authorities with no statutory obligation to do so. What they sought
from Parliament was enabling legislation and that they used absolutely
marvellously. If we say now that the only way they can be rescued
is by presenting local authorities with a statutory obligation
to do so, (a) I do not think it is practical or would work and,
(b) I would wonder what has so changed that local authorities
cannot actually do that? Setting up a national agency with a statutory
responsibility to report to Government, to advise Government,
to support parks and so on—the way in which the Countryside
Commission and the Sports Council and others have operated—I
think would be excellent.
Chairman
135. Very briefly, you have reservations about
the New Opportunities Fund. What are they?
(Mr Barber) The reservations are, firstly, that I
think it was misrepresented in the press release as being £125
million for green spaces and, quite clearly, when you read down
it, it is not; it is a catch-all for the environment. It is the
smallest so far of the proposals that the New Opportunities Fund
has made and, as yet, it is not indicating or seeming to recognise
the important role that local authorities and their managers have
in actually enabling communities to develop and improve parks,
and so on. So, I think one worries, as one always does about measures
that come out of Government, as to whether there is anybody actually
there that understands what they are proposing.
Chairman: On that rather cynical note, can I
thank you very much for your evidence. Thank you.
1 Mr Alan Barber is also the Specialist Adviser to
the Committee for this inquiry. Back
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