Parks and Remuneration
"We have to stop being quiet and polite about it."
By David Bocking
Over the years, there have been plenty of deaths on Wadsley Common. Murders, unexplained disappearances, bodies in the snow.
You can’t help but think about it, if you head up there to volunteer with tree work in the winter months. It’ll usually be freezing, the wind howling, while far below the people of Hillsborough are safely sipping their hot chocolates as the thorns sting through your mittens.
I met a team up there one cold February morning fourteen years ago, clearing brambles and silver birch trees to try and restore an important lowland heath habitat. There was a knowledgeable city council ranger with a host of tools and time to chat, and a dozen or more volunteers from the Wadsley and Loxley Commoners, all cheerily carrying out backbreaking work. This was years before anyone used the phrase “nature emergency”.
In 2010, the council ranger at Wadsley met the volunteers regularly. Together they’d developed a plan for work on the common to improve the habitat for nature, to maintain the paths and trails, and to promote the 100 acre site to other Sheffielders. There was even a ranger-led walk programme, and public bird-box making sessions with council staff.
They’re still working up there, doing their best to carry on conserving their local landscape for the common good. Across the city, 100 or more formal and informal voluntary groups are doing the same, in city parks, woodlands, riversides and the other 800 or more wild (or wildish) places. This week, I met representatives of some of those voluntary groups who head out there battling the elements to keep our wild spaces healthy and sustainable and open to us all.
We were shown the ‘graph of doom’ illustrating how funding to support this kind of work in parks and open spaces has collapsed: an annual budget of £8.5 million for ranger and support services in 2010 is now at least £5 million less.
In the council’s ‘try and avoid going bankrupt at all costs, please’ budget of earlier this year, the parks, leisure and communities committee budget was the only department to actually go down, by £8.7 million pounds. I hear another year of cuts to the parks and countryside of Sheffield is planned after this one.
For a desperate accountant, it’s an easy choice to make. In Sheffield, the austerity era thinking has been: do we cut education, health, social care, development for jobs, or shall we cut parks, as the grass’ll keep growing?
In the end, since parks and green spaces are a non-statutory service (unlike education, social care and waste management), councils are officially allowed to cut the parks budget, so the decision is almost made for them nationally.
So councillors across the country just sigh and sign, and life seems to go on, as the slow deterioration in parks and wild places isn’t always easy to see — unless you’re a flood risk manager, an ecologist, or a parent wondering how to find somewhere to take your kids without dogs and dog mess. And, after all, we’ve got that army of willing volunteers to keep things more or less alright.
Dr Nicola Dempsey doesn’t think so. A senior lecturer in Sheffield University’s School of Architecture and Landscape, Nicola has studied relationships between people and their local landscapes across the globe.
Our tradition of volunteering in the UK is quite unique in the world, she says, but we may be coming to a pinch point. Changes in the retirement age are making it harder for people in their later fifties and early sixties to get stuck in after leaving work, along with a side of post-Covid exhaustion. And that’s starting to tell. “The mantle hasn’t been passed back to the local authority, so the pressure continues,” she says.
Nicola is also secretary of the Sheffield Green Spaces Forum who bring together the city’s various green and blue space volunteers to try and share ideas with each other, and lobby the council. I’ve met the group and its members many times over the last year, and at their meeting this week, it’s clear their patience is wearing thin.
“I think the city has lost it,” said chair Ted Talbot, adding that the support for Sheffield’s army of parks, woodland and river ‘blue and green’ volunteers isn’t enough. “For all the reasons we know. And we have to stop being quiet and polite about it.”
Ted knows whereof he speaks, having worked as a ranger, a council green space manager, and for national and local land charities. The idea of a choice between looking after a park and taking a child with special needs to school is at best misguided, he tells me.
“In the good old days, you would get all of the community of interests together, like the sporting people, the bird watchers, the dog walkers, and you’d get them all together with the local people and you’d spend two or three days thrashing it all out on big maps about how to manage their park,” he says.
It might be: mow here, football pitches here, no dogs here, a new fence here, patch of meadow here, that kind of thing. But now we have examples like Manor Fields and the Limb Valley where parks are doing things we hadn’t factored in a few years ago, like slowing flood water and planting to improve habitats for specific wildlife.
“So we've got this park,” says Ted, “and it functions in twenty different ways. It's providing an important civic delivery of stopping these houses down here flooding, it's storing this amount of carbon because these are active and healthy woodlands here and active and healthy soils too. We've got some allotments in this corner, so it's providing some food. The three local schools use it for education. It's used for parkrun and cross-country. There are some football fields and a basketball court. There's a cafe and some toilets so people with low mobility can improve their health and mental health.”
He pauses for breath. “When you look at this, parks and green and blue spaces are the Swiss army knives of our leisure services, and they're free and we’re about to just let them collapse.”
There are signs of hope. Groups like the Friends of the Porter Valley, the Friends of Graves Park, the Friends of Ecclesall Woods, the Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust and Friends of Whirlow Brook Park can draw on expertise from fundraising, accountancy and marketing professionals to make a huge difference to their wild spaces.
Patient and effective volunteers in Parkwood Springs, Wardsend Cemetery and the Shire Brook Valley have also navigated their wild spaces to a better future by working with the council to bring in government grants.
And new groups can start afresh, sometimes attracting a slightly younger membership, like Greener Greenhill. “We can attract families with specific one off events, like planting, which are good fun as well as practically helpful,” says Lindy Stone from Greener Greenhill.
The council told me they wished to thank all the voluntary groups working around the city, that rangers, the parks service and community foresters still support voluntary groups, including tools and skills training, raising funds and liaising with local area committees and external ranger agencies from groups like the Eastern Moors Partnership, Green Estate and Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust. The council also has a new green space apprentice scheme, with ten trainees working on nature and health related projects.
Work in parks, rivers and green spaces will need to evolve, they added, not least to be in line with the local nature recovery strategy. Councillor Kurtis Crossland, Chair of the Communities, Parks and Leisure Committee at Sheffield City Council, said:
“The voluntary action that takes place across the city’s greenspaces, which are cherished by all of Sheffield’s communities, is nothing short of inspiring.”
“A key challenge and priority is finding ways to create a more balanced picture of social action, focusing on increasing voluntary activity in areas of the city that currently experience less engagement in such initiatives.”
Paying for parks
There is now tonnes of evidence about the health value of our wild places, director of Public Health Greg Fell tells me, to the extent that his department is now investing around £400,000 every year in some of our public open spaces. But it isn’t the £5 million every year that the green and blue lungs of Sheffield lost since austerity started.
The model of Friends of X Park has worked quite well, up to now, as long as it’s supported by keen champions in the local authority, who notionally own X park.
But the model can lead to the places with skilled, professional, confident, time wealthy and well organised park volunteers snapping up funding and attention – and an overreliance on sporadic grants.
We could bite the bullet and ask users to pay, or donate. There are at least 30 million visits a year to Sheffield’s parks, rivers and green spaces, says Ted, so a 17p donation for every visit by a dog walker, commuter or parkrunner would put back a decent ranger service, he observes.
Or we could come up with an external plan, where larger not for profits take over parks services and raise external funding for them. Newcastle tried this, found out it cost more, and is now about to bring its parks back into council control.
“It seems to me that if you think about the three big issues of our time, it’s the climate emergency, the nature emergency and you could call it the public health emergency,” says Ted Talbot. “And green and blue urban spaces are a big part of the solution for all of those.”
So given the list of benefits, should the provision of well managed parks and urban countryside sit with waste management and education as a statutory service?
“Yes,” says Nicola Dempsey. “None of the research into how we look after our parks has come up with a solution that is better than taxation. They’re not just pretty places, they’re not just a draw on resources, they’re part of the solution.”
David Bocking writes at the site below. Tomorrow he will be digging more into the public health impacts of Sheffield’s parks.
Sheffield City Council spends millions of pounds each year of our council tax money cleaning up litter and fly tipping. All of which is completely avoidable if people dispose of waste properly. Back in 2010 with a series of Freedom of Infomation requests (before the Amey and Veolia private contracts kicked in) I calculated it was somewhere in the region of £8m. This was still an estimate because certain departments like education did not keep seperate records of how much they spent cleaning up. A fraction of that £8m would have kept the libraries operating with paid staff in 2014.
And here we are now with Sheffield’s valued and well used green spaces under further threat with many of the volunteer groups at breaking point.
Sheffield Litter Pickers for example, do a fantastic job across the city. But as many of us who litter pick know, there are always those out there who tell us we are wasting our time. Or are keen to point out where needs cleaning up next, but they are too busy to help. Or not to bother because it is the council's job... The real solution is people not dropping it in the first place. It would save volunteer time which could be used more productively elsewhere. I personally would like to spend time doing more interesting jobs in our green spaces and I'm not alone.
The suggestion of a small donation to help with the upkeep of our green spaces is a good one. But when I see Abbeydale Road South lined with cars and the Millhouses Park car park empty, I wonder how this will work. The money from that car park (£1 per hour) goes directly to the upkeep of Millhouses Park and it's clear users do not feel the need to pay it.
We should all be outraged at how much is spent on cleaning up rubbish, when valued services like Parks, Countryside and Woodlands are on their knees.
The importance of our green/blue infrastructure of open spaces and waterways does not end with the benefits outlined in David's customarily excellent article. Many of these are also heritage assets, some - for example the delicate network of rivers, weirs, dams and goits once used to power industry - of global significance. Heritage complements and expands upon the economic, health and wellbeing benefits of its green and blue components. A superb example of how the two mesh and the value they bring to the community has been the two lottery-funded Finding Lost Norton Park projects of the Friends of Graves Park, revealing a rich multi-layered landscape and cultural heritage embedded in a space that has also provided the services that David describes to four generations of Sheffielders. Many other green space friends' groups see the same duality, including those supporting Wardsend Cemetery, Rivelin, Loxley and Shire Brook.
Failure to invest in these will in the long term - perhaps not so very long - be every bit as disastrous as a failure to invest in health, education or housing.
In the Tribune's recent article about the airport, it was reported that SYMCA has promised it £5.3m annually on the basis of its previous support of £180m GVA and 2,700 jobs, plus an entirely speculative £6.6bn from an associated development (presumably the total, not annual). Research for Historic England shows that in 2022 the heritage sector in Yorkshire and the Humber supported 52,000 jobs and £2.4bn GVA (South Yorkshire's economy is 22% of Y&H). This doesn't include spending in other parts of the economy by tourists who come for the heritage, nor the value of health and other social benefits. I'm sure a similar case can be made for green spaces. Please can these sectors receive funding in proportion?