How can we ensure that less well off residents enjoy the benefits of our best Green Flag Awarded and other prominent parks. That question has occupied me for some time but at last I think I have a solution, and it occurred to me as I listened to the incoming Mayor of London delivering his acceptance speech. And like all good ideas it is both simple and straight forward.
My proposal is that the senior citizens’ travel card strategy be extended to embrace a citizens’ Park and Ride scheme, with the less well off citizens given a free travel card that can only be used to visit a park in London. (Perhaps nationally, if the Mayor can persuade the Government to support his idea) Travel could easily be restricted to off peak times when the transport system runs predominately empty services and therefore marginal cost and inconvenience to business travellers is extremely low.
Imagine the health benefits from such a scheme. Imagine also the impact on advocacy for better funded and therefore maintained parks as the community gets to see and make use of more parks. This also begs the question, why is not some of the budget for parks used as a development fund to pay for travel to the services’ parks and through this process raise awareness of the potential impact of further budget reductions. I cannot think of a more effective way to get the message across to the public and through them to the politician.
Radical? Perhaps. But difficult times call for radical solutions. The Mayor of London has already shown his support for London’s parks through his Priority Parks scheme and invested millions in the capital’s environmental legacy; furthermore he prioritised parks in his Mayoral manifesto.
Is it not time to extend his approach and to invest in public health once again and in so doing match the philanthropy and altruism of the 19th century public park movement?
With the continuing negotiations about what and the extent of the concessions during the ‘hose-pipe-ban’ set against a backdrop of some of the wettest weather experience in recent years, have we not lost sight of something? By this I mean that planning that involves incremental assumptions where past events are incremented forward to predict future events may be an inadequate mechanism for predicting the future. If indeed any proof was necessary that such an approach is unhelpful ask yourself why it was that that approach to planning did not predict our current circumstances . . .
What is now needed is a far more sophisticated approach to strategy and one that applies ‘Chaos Theory’. Coincidentally, you may believe that this theory apply describes the utilities approach to the current situation and much of their response. What we are faced with are random events and weather patterns that are both non linear and chaotic thereby confounding ‘normal’ rational, linear and incremental planning approaches. And to pretend otherwise is to mimic the Ostrich and bury our heads in an increasingly wet sandy soil.
Hose pipe bans will not, on their own, resolve the problems that we now facing. It will require a combination of infrastructural investment, a drastic reduction in water lost through leakage, more careful use of water and the stakeholders’ interest to become sovereign. Water is far too valuable a commodity to be traded on a laissez faire free market where wealth and power determine access. It is also too important to be managed as a ’one size fits all’ commodity so to the above issues we must add that of ensuring that the use that water is put to determines its quality and availability.
In essence this requires ‘water’ to be regulated and controlled directly by government and public services and not traded by a quasi market economy model, chaos theory informed or otherwise. What is now required is a collaborative effort, public service and private commerce so as to resolve the medium term problem with a longer term sustainable solution.
Time to talk and collaborate . . .
The water crisis continues unabated although some clarity is now evident concerning permitted water use within specified landscapes. These same exemptions may also apply to nominated parks landscapes, but that is still awaiting further clarification – primarily the Olympic ‘landscapes’. But surely it is absurd that ‘car washes’ are exempt from the rules on the use of water. If the Government is serious about the need for sustainable planting and action to mitigate climate change the case for watering trees and shrubs and some parks landscapes must surely rank higher than ‘car washes’.
However more urgent attention is required to redress the indiscriminate application of water and to demonstrate that the public sector is taking this matter seriously. The well respected organisers of Britain in Bloom, The RHS, ‘The Green Flag Partnership’ and local ‘In-Bloom’ organisers can and should immediately introduce into their marking scheme marks for the use of water, and the way it is collected and stored for later use – marking down users that do not conserver water in this way. They could also develop a scale of water use that relates bedding and other displays to the amount of water that they require thereby encouraging low water use planting schemes – and introduce an award for this category.
The same approach should also be applied to, say, HLF funded schemes. For an example of best practice in this regard the City of London’s parks service won an innovation award a few years ago for a most imaginative and well thought through scheme at one of its parks that collected winter rain, stored it and then used it during the summer for its trees, shrubs and bedding displays.
What about the future? My proposals are;
1. All HLF funded landscapes and quality parks and landscape competitions should require entrants to describe how much water they propose to use on their landscapes, the balance between collected water and mains water use, and their arrangements for improving their collection and storage of water over time;
2. That all proposals for new and revitalised landscape schemes should publish the water requirements for the design, including the arrangements to collect and store water and the balance in use between collected and mains water.
3. Each parks should publish its annual water usage and the balance between collected and mains water usage;
4. All parks services should publish their arrangements to collect and store water from their buildings and other ‘roofed’ structures;
5. The Government and the water utilities should ‘incentivise’ the collection and storage of ‘grey’ water by parks services and commercials users in the form of grants or tax breaks;
There is an important opportunity for parks services, the Government and the water utilities to demonstrate to the public that they are mindful of the restrictions being placed on the general publics’ usage of water and that the public and private sectors are actively working to reduce their water use also. Such an approach would enable parks services to ‘make headlines’ about their role in climate mitigation, sustainability and to justify budgets.
I am pleased that some sense has been introduced into the use of water by domestic users for their gardens – after all, the contribution this form of ‘greening’ makes to climate mitigation is important. But so too is the contribution that parks & parks services are making, and on a much grander scale . . .
So where is the lobbying for our usage to benefit from agreed exemptions – unless that is we can use ‘leaky’ house pipes which presumably we have to purchase . . .
We are to be prepared for water shortages, and contrary to our intuition it is essential it seems. But why? Why do we continue to use ‘expensively processed water’ to irrigate our parks and landscapes? What is wrong with the use of grey water? Most continental parks and for that matter municipal authorities use ‘grey water’ for this important life giving sustenance and municipal cleansing. The UK’s municipal authorities have always eschewed that practice.
Perhaps it is because most parks and open spaces water use is not metered – a heresy and sorry colleagues but it is generally true! If it is not, please publish your water usage so that we can all see how thrifty you are.
Apart from modern purpose built landscapes such as the Olympic Park, most parks and open spaces and other municipal landscape water usage is not measure and or monitored. Why? ‘Grey water’ is perfectly acceptable and in many cases causes less damage to the plantscape and the ecosystem than the chemically treated ‘processed’ variety.
Furthermore, is it not time for all landscapes to be given a ’water use’ index? In a increasing climate changing world, water will overtake oil and become THE most precious of commodities. Time for the overused ? in this blog to be replaced by an exclamation mark showing a change of practice and thinking!
My local paper and residents of a local park were outraged about the massacre of their snow girls and boys by landscape maintenance workers using a saw!? It appears that the gardeners believed that the snow people would damage the grass and went around destroying them in front of the children that had just built them. My local parks then are no longer for people to indulge in harmless family activities in case they damage the grass. Ummm.
The council’s response to the outrage caused by their staffs’ actions was to inform them to use their common sense and to let people enjoy themselves. Now that’s a novel idea, perhaps that’s what parks are for!
How will the skills deficit be resolved if we concentrate only on apprenticeships? An elite cadre that are too few in number to make a significant difference. Is there not a case for a dual track training approach that allows staff to move between an educational, college, based approach to a pure training approach as their aptitude dictates and to train staff in the necessary skills immediately prior to them requiring a particular skill? Such a scheme would enable parks and the wider landscape maintenance sector to deal effectively with the skills deficit.
A further dilemma is that with the dire reductions in both parks finance and landscape maintenance specifications, are we not in danger of being unable to provide sufficient, any, opportunity for staff to acquire the range of skills specified in apprenticeships and skills training programmes? And just as important, to develop their proficiency?
In the 70s and 80s a system prevailed in local government – it was called scheme A & B – pioneered by the then, Local Government Training Board – that provided all staff with the opportunity to acquire skills and to do so at a pace that was compatible with the needs of the organisation and their abilities. The training and education was also undertaken when required and reinforced by on-the-job training. This approach was augmented by the requirement in skilled horticulturists’ job descriptions to pass on their skills to the less skilled, many an apprentice and trainee has benefited from that approach. Those requirements do not seem to exist in the 21 Century. Why?
Some many questions . . .
Once again the rising world-wide rates of obesity make the headlines (FT Weekend, 19 Nov 2011, p. 12). You will not be surprised to hear that commentary is focused on the burden this epidemic inflicts on the public purse. It is suggested that eating less is the panacea or that dieting is the answer, all the evidence shows that for most people both are a short term fix! Obesity is caused by both the quantity and the quality of the food we consume linked to a lack of exercise.
In fact the solution to this modern-day epidemic is exercise combined with healthy food. However none of this will happen without some form of government intervention. But government should be courageous because the potential benefits to public health are exceptional. In this respect I have an agenda for change:
1. Encourage more mobile phone users into parks – have you noticed how much exercise they take whilst talking on their phones! Better still; designate it as an Olympic Sport!
2. Launch a ‘Lifelong Exercise’ marketing campaign along the lines of ‘Lifelong Learning’.
3. Set a statutory minimum acreage that each council must provide for food growing, advice and assistance in their parks. This would surely increase the use made of very many parks and most probably make them more community based and valued.
4. Ensure that all eateries in parks serve healthy food and not some variant of fast, furious and fattening.
5. Add 3. & 4. above to the criteria for Green Flag Award.
6. Provide HLF grants for schemes that have a proven track record for reducing obesity and crucially assisting people to keep that weight off in the long term.
7. Take the word ‘excise’ out of the equation and focus on parks as places of enjoyment not torture.
8. Accept that our body shape changes with age – and so does our body-index rating. Eschew the objective and the use of the word ‘thin’ it is seriously misleading.
9. Restore to its rightful place ‘Shanks’s Pony’ as a mode of transport. (Shanks’s pony, Going on … – To walk. The original Shanks’s pony was a horse-drawn lawnmower with nowhere for the driver to sit, so he had to walk along behind!)
10. Think parks as the solution, and government finance as the means to that end.
The Forestry Commission’s Woodland Carbon Code leads the way in setting the ‘Gold’ standard for assessing the actual ’lock-up’ achieved by woodlands as we struggle to reduce atmospheric carbon. Parks also have a role to play. Not only do the larger parks have sufficient woodland to register for the Forestry Commission’s scheme but also to add that accomplishment to parks essential role on heath and well-being.
But we can go further, the trees, shrubs and other plant material that is so abundant in parks also trap particulates that cause or aggravate breathing disorders. In that respect, parks have a vital role to play as ‘air-cleansers’ and once again contribute to government health & clean air agendas. Off course we still require further scientific research to ensure that a rigorous assessment can be made of our contribution, but that is no reason not to begin to make the policy maker aware of that contribution.
What is important is that the wider societal contribution of parks, as carbon and particulate sinks that protect and improve public health 24/7, is both publicised and measured. It is now time for the first parks service to sign-up to the Forestry Commission’s scheme and to include this pivotal advantage in their advocacy and funding arguments.
Will that be your service?
As a consultant you get invited to tender for some strange sounding contracts, none so odd though as last Friday’s offering which ask me to express an interest in providing ‘Reindeer for Hire! No, it’s not a joke, and yes I do take plenty of water with it! Now, strange as it may seem to you all, there ain’t that many Reindeer in Brentford, (Bees aplenty, but few Reindeer) so I will have to look further afield. I’ve tried emailing RTRNR to get his availability, no reply to date. Incidentally, how many of you can name all 9 Reindeer . . . No Googling them, and if so, do you have an email address for them that you could send me or their web page address? There is a point to all of this; the private sector has been planning for the December spending spree for some time, perhaps the parks sector should also begin to plan for the increase in visitor numbers during December and over the New Year! The influx of citizens and the next generation of rate payers provide an opportunity to make our case again about the benefits that parks confer regardless of whether you use them for recreation or just take pride in contributing to them for the general benefits they provide for all citizens’ health. So, dust of those notice boards, get rid of all those outdated flyers and get advocating . . .
