PLOT WORKS OUT FOR ALLOTMENT HOLDERS

20-05-2008

Allotment holders in Birmingham who were turfed off their plots are celebrating after Moseley Golf Club withdrew its appeal against a failed planning application on the land.  As Mark Jackson reports, the growers now want the site returned to them.

Mosley Golf Club has now accepted Birmingham Planning Committee’s refusal to allow 2 acres of the old Billesley Allotment - enough for 35 plots – to be turned into driving range

This was land which had previously been used for growing, but after a botched attempt at issuing a Compulsory Purchase Order by the City Council, it reverted to the club (see link here).

Last year they applied for a change of use, but plans for a practice facility were rejected by councillors who said it flouted government policy and the local development plan which supports allotments where there’s demand.

Information released under the Freedom of Information Act (obtained by plot holders displaced from the former site and local MP Lynne Jones) shows that within 3/4 of a mile of the Billesley Lane site there is a waiting list of over 100 people wishing to have an allotment.

There are now calls from Geoff Bainbridge Chair of Billesley Lane allotment Association, to revisit the failed 2002 Compulsory Purchase Order and secure the use of this land for allotments.

Birmingham Friends of the Earth point to the cost of oil, which has risen from $60 to $120 in the past year and global food supply problems brought on by climate change and the global structure of biofuels.

Campaigners such as Localise West Midlands’ Karen Leach have been saying for a long time that losing any land for local food production, especially where there are such high levels of local demand, is total stupidity.

The way I see it, as an allotment holder at Billesley Lane myself, Moseley Golf Club benefitted from Council’s incompetence in during 2002 CPO fiasco and recouped the £140,000 pounds they spent on legal fees.

They managed with the help of the local authority to evict mostly women and children from the 30 or so plots which now remain empty and which have been vandalised by the removal of trees.

In 2004 on the 1.5 acre site to the rear of the course, the Golf Club developed 24 flats at £240,000 each rather than enlarge the course, so it’s easy to see their long term financial motivation.  That's why they don't want local people using valuable and much needed local allotment facilities which have been in existence since the 1920s.

But they realised in this instance that we would win and were too chicken to fight.

Across the city, the 2004 approval of a “planning gain” development on the former Victoria Jubilee Allotments in Handsworth, (Birmingham’s largest green-space loss for 100 years) has still to generate the promised 80 replacement plots.