Newcastle parks future sealed as council rejects plea to rethink 'nuclear' option on Urban Green

Urban Green Cafe in Exhibition Park, Newcastle Upon Tyne.
-Credit:ChronicleLive


Control over Newcastle’s parks will return to council hands, after calls to rethink the “nuclear option” of scrapping charity Urban Green were rejected.

Newcastle City Council’s Labour leadership agreed last November to cut off support for the charitable trust it set up in 2019 to look after 33 parks and more than 60 allotment plots, amid major concerns about its finances. Urban Green Newcastle (UGN) predicted last year that it would have a £6.9 million deficit up to 2029 and would need to rely on continued council funding to survive.

It was originally hoped that the charity would become self-sustaining after 10 years, but factors including Covid-19 and inflation rates have been blamed for the struggles that ultimately led the council into a U-turn on what was previously called a “pioneering” vision. But the move to bring around 40 parks staff back in-house at the civic centre was delayed as opposition councillors questioned whether the council will in fact be better placed to protect the city’s green spaces.

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The transfer was effectively put on hold before Christmas as Liberal Democrats took the rare step of bringing the Labour cabinet’s decision for a special ‘call in’ debate held at Wednesday night’s council meeting. Despite accusations that the move to pull the plug on UGN had been “rushed” and that more time was needed for the council to develop more detailed plans, the council voted by a 36 to 27 margin to proceed with the parks reorganisation.

It is now expected that UGN’s employees and assets will be absorbed back into the council by the end of February, rather than the original target of the end of this month. Labour’s Alex Hay, the council’s deputy leader, told colleagues that the charity was created with the best intentions but the post-Covid financial challenges it faces have become “insurmountable”. He added that a new approach was needed to “ensure the long-term sustainability of our parks and allotments” and warned that any further delay to the transfer would only increase risks and uncertainty for staff.

Liberal Democrat Gareth Kane, a long-term critic of the parks trust, said that its original business plan appeared to be “written on the back of a fag packet” and lamented the “crazy spectacle” that saw the council itself impose restrictions on the number of large, revenue-generating festivals UGN could stage. However, he warned the local authority against taking the “nuclear approach” of scrapping UGN and accused Labour of “panicked flip-flopping from one extreme to the other”.

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There have been worries about how the council will make up for the loss of grant funding which UGN has been able to access as a charity, with Green councillor Nick Hartley questioning why there was such urgency for a “rushed transition without a clear plan for addressing the funding shortfall”. The council, which is expected to make spending cuts totalling more than £21 million in the coming weeks, has said it will take at least £1.5 million per year just to keep the parks in their current state.

The Lib Dems complained that the council had not given due regard to the “very real risks” involved in taking back its parks, calling for the decision to be referred back to the cabinet for a full business plan and new public consultation to be drawn up.

But Paul Frew, Labour’s cabinet member for finance, said that no better alternative options had been put forward. He added: “This was a decision taken by the council in November and we are stood here two months later not able to get on with the process because Newcastle Liberal Democrats wanted to play politics with this.”