Following the request from National Society of Allotments and Lesiure Gardeners to AMAS and other allotment society governing bodies throught the country to voice their opinions on the recent statutory review, the following information is from the DCLG website:
“Local authorities are bound by statute. Their functions are set out in numerous Acts of Parliament and many of these functions have associated legal duties.At no point in recent history has there been a comprehensive list of legal duties placed on local authorities.
The Government therefore agreed with the Local Government Association that they should compile a list of these duties to give clarity about what these are.
On 30 June 2011, a summary of the responses and the latest revised list of duties were published. This exercise has successfully enabled a clearer picture of the requirements on local authorities, and created a valuable record that had previously not existed”.
There were 1294 Statutory Duties placed on the list for review. 6,103 responses were received in total, amounting to 23,533 specific comments; of those comments,2,947 were in response to the removal of Section 23 of the Small Holdings and Allotments Act 1908.
Of the responses therefore, nearly 50% contain a comment on allotments!
Of the specific comments, 13% are concerned with allotments. This indicates to us that it was a worthwhile exercise in letting Government know how we feel about the protection of allotments for future generations. If we assume optimistically that the 2947 allotment comments all came from allotmenteers, that represents about a 1.5% response from allotment holders across England and Wales. That’s not bad for letter writing and emailing.
A big thanks, to all the AMAS members and non-members who expressed their views to support our allotments.
