Parks and Recreation: Unlike the TV programme, there is no quick fix for the crisis facing British parks

The parks department was the first to feel the axe when the fictional American city of Pawnee went bust in NBC’s wonderful sitcom Parks and Recreation, all seven seasons of which can currently be seen on Amazon Prime. Leslie Knope, the sunny lead character, ultimately only saved it through staging a massive festival to raise revenue for her city. Even her grumpy, but secretly good-hearted, libertarian boss Ron Swanson was dragged into helping.

Such commercial opportunism is an increasing feature of Britain’s real-life councils that find themselves in a similar financial straightjacket to the one Pawnee faced. Their parks are also under grave threat, but they lack the quick fix of a fictional festival to raise the cash to keep them going. The threat they face is sustained.

This was originally going to be an ode to my local park, Clayhall Park, which is one of the lucky ones, and it still features because it serves as a good example of why parks are important, and the benefits they bring when they are properly looked after. But it soon became clear in researching this article that the existential crisis facing Britain’s parks generally had to take priority. Clayhall Park is in a remarkably healthy state. That’s not something that can be said of all the 27,000 parks and recreation grounds up and down this country.

Consider the recent figures put out by the Local Government Association (LGA), the umbrella body for local authorities. It says its members are facing a funding black hole that will reach £8bn by 2025. Such a vortex will suck in and ultimately destroy the discretionary local services that play a crucial, but unsung, role in our national life, as councils are forced into cutbacks so they can maintain the statutory services they have to offer.

“Communities may suffer the loss of leisure and cultural facilities, fewer bus services, unkempt parks and green spaces and see fly-tippers go unpunished without government investment in under-pressure council services,” the organisation warned in launching a campaign to influence the forthcoming government spending review. Its figures show that in the decade to 2020, councils will have lost almost 60p out of every £1 granted by central government for the provision of local services.

“Some councils are being pushed to the brink by this unprecedented loss of funding and an ongoing surge in demand for children’s services, adult social care services and homelessness support. This is on top of having to absorb other cost pressures, such as higher national insurance contributions, the apprenticeship levy and the national living wage,” the LGA said.

The fictional situation faced by Pawnee, which had two budget hawks appointed to run the place by the state of Indiana, mirrors the very real plight of Conservative-run Northamptonshire County Council. It had two government-appointed commissioners sent in after it effectively went bankrupt. We haven’t yet seen a repeat, but some councils are running on financial fumes.

Debt Resistance UK, a campaigning group, has unearthed an accounting trick that it believes may be all that is keeping several more from having the commissioners called in. Several years ago now, a number of local authorities, encouraged by government, took out complex “Lobo (lender option borrower option) loans” with banks rather than approaching the Public Works Loans Board for their capital projects, as had traditionally been the case.

These loans started out cheap, but their interest rates can rise dramatically. In many cases they have.

Some are linked financial derivatives. When commercial organisations have this sort of paper on their books they have to declare the market value when the accounts are collated, known as “marking to market”. But correspondence unearthed by the organisation appears to show that councils no longer have to do this.

Because local authorities have been relieved of that obligation it’s not always possible to get a true picture of just how bad their financial holes are. As so often happens with government, the problem is effectively being kicked down the road. But eventually the chickens will have to come home to roost. The impact on local services such as parks could be brutal.

Even councils which haven’t resorted to arcane city financing have been steadily chipping away at budgets as their block grants from central government have fallen.

Prior to the LGA issuing its clarion call, a report by MPs on the Parliamentary Communities and Local Government Committee warned that the future of many of our 27,000 parks and recreation grounds had reached a “tipping point” with budgets to maintain them being cut by a staggering 97 per cent.

The report warned of a return to the neglect of the 1980s and 1990s, with reduced opening hours combined with an increase in litter, the removal of play equipment, the closure of public toilets, a rise in vandalism, an increase in the number of rats. The austerity imposed by the Conservative government means that the pips are no longer just squeaking. They’re screaming.

A crisis in parks may not seem like the biggest or the most important of issues created by that policy. But these spaces represent a national resource that we have perhaps too easily been taking for granted. They play an important role in the health of the nation, both physical and mental. They are meeting places, hubs of activity, places where our deeply divided communities can come together and breathe a little much-needed fresh air.

Clayhall Park is a good example. You won’t find the place on any tourist maps. It is not even the fanciest park in the outer London borough of Redbridge where I live. It’s a roughly rectangular field off the Southend Road within a stone’s throw of the constituency office of Wes Streeting, the local Labour MP who managed to turn what had previously been the very marginal seat of Ilford North, when he took it from the Conservative incumbent, into a safe one at the last election.

It has paths running around and through it, benches to be found at strategic points and bins that people mostly make use of use for their dogs’ waste and other litter. This being an English park, it has a tea shop too. You can find facilities like it in any number of towns and cities up and down the country. It’s where I go when the insanity that this country has descended into gets too much.

At lunchtimes when the weather is conducive, and sometimes when it isn’t, I push a wheelchair around it while listening to angry rap music and dreaming up pieces like this. It helps to have something with a beat and a bit of fire to get my arms pumping. Sometimes I make use of the static hand bike and some of the other machines at the outdoor gym while I’m at it, although with one of my arms only held together thanks to the insertion of a big block of metal I have to be careful.

Remarkably, Redbridge has recently found the funding to enhance Clayhall’s offering with a free calisthenics gym to go with the existing machines. This year its budget for parks, events, plays, allotments, nature conservation, grounds maintenance and the local Valentines Mansion amounts to £2m. A further £1.6m has been pledged for new play equipment. To do that has involved some innovating. For example, the exercise equipment that I use in Clayhall is supported by public health money.

Council leader Jas Athwal, who has responsibility for parks through his role as cabinet member for growth and leisure, has also worked with Essex, Middlesex, Surrey and Kent cricket clubs on the installation of nets at Seven Kings Park, and he has ambitions to extend this to others. Notwithstanding the music I listen to, my wheeling sessions are very soothing, because Clayhall Park is a soothing sort of place. Wheeling around it works better for my head than any antidepressant.

It’s also a wildly diverse sort of place that provides an antidote to the nasty, narrow-minded and nationalistic face that England presents to the world right now, the flames of which have been fanned by its government.

A more open, welcoming England can to be found within its confines. Its users are from many different races and religions and they speak many languages. South Asian ones are common, because people of that background are strongly represented in the community. But you’ll also hear eastern European ones, especially in the tea shop, where some of the staff clearly hail from that part of the world.

This is not a place that Nigel Farage, who once moaned about hearing languages other than English on his travels around the country, would feel comfortable. That’s a good thing. It helps makes Clayhall Park a pleasant place to visit. It’s a place where people who are both English and “citizens of the world”, who were sneered at by Theresa May in one of her earlier speeches, hang out.

I was particularly struck by a couple of kids I recently saw playing basketball while I was burning some calories on the outdoor gym’s static hand bike. They were of south Asian descent, but they were playing an American game. Both of them were in Nike gear, but peering out from beneath the hoody worn by the smaller of the pair was a Barcelona FC top.

The setting was very English despite this. But this “better England” is increasingly hard to find; the one self-confident enough to be relaxed about people having multiple identities.

When I’m pushing around Clayhall Park, I can almost convince myself that we might, at some point, be able to take back our country from the people who seem to hate everything that is modern in modern England.

That’s not to say some of the people walking their dogs around it don’t harbour unpleasant views, and while Redbridge as a borough voted to Remain in the EU, Streeting’s constituency, which borders Brexity Havering, did not. But they’re not usually on display.

The park is used by all ages. OIder people sit on the benches with their heads in books, or their phones, while teenagers, those not playing sport, often have their heads in each other. Parents gossip while their children use the play areas. Lots of people run, or power walk, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in larger groups.

They’re mostly friendly and as I wheel, I’m comforted by the fact that a certain decency that we used to take for granted hasn’t been entirely extinguished despite the attempts of our malignant rulers and their cheerleaders to vomit all over it.

The money Athwal has found means it remains well maintained, with lengthy opening hours. I frequently see people working on the plants, filling potholes created by the effect of tree roots on tarmac, cleaning up the messes some people insist upon leaving. There were even grounds keepers around on Boxing Day, when I took my wheels out with a view to burning off Christmas dinner.

Can it last?

Athwal says he has sought to resist taking the knife to his borough’s nine parks, including Clayhall. But his challenge is formidable. Redbridge’s budget has fallen by £166m since 2010. “We have wrestled with significant funding reductions from central government but are determined not to let that stand in the way of investment in key services for our residents,” Athwal says.

“We want the very best for our families and are committed to providing top-class leisure facilities and parks across the borough. When we came in they were in decline. We have sought to reverse that, to make hubs of them so they become meeting places where people can go to hang out.

“I don’t think people ask for much. They just want a good service from their council tax. The parks are a way that they can see that they’re getting something back for the money they put in.’

Joel Benjamin, campaigner

At the same time, however, the council has also had to look at alternative ways of raising revenue, including increasing its commercial activities in common with many other local authorities. This worries campaigners because it inevitably involves the councils, which are there to provide services, exposing themselves to a significant degree of risk that is part and parcel of involvement in commercial enterprise.

And even with this, Redbridge hasn’t been able to escape making painful choices. The Ilford Recorder recently, for example, reported that four children’s centres face the axe as a means of plugging a hole in the budget, and the squeeze shows no sign of abating as the Conservatives prepare to fling their country into the economic abyss known as Brexit.

The thought of losing Clayhall troubles me as I make my way around it. Joel Benjamin, a campaigner with Debt Resistance UK, says that in the past four decades since Margaret Thatcher came to power, Britain has quietly sold off half of its public land, including parkland.

“Remarkably, for an issue with such profound implications for public health and social policy, we almost never hear it mentioned in these terms in the media,” he says, not without justification.

“It was Thatcher who falsely claimed that ‘the problem with socialism is you always run out of other people’s money to give away’. In truth, as we have seen with quantitative easing and the bank bailouts, money is virtually unlimited when it comes to socialism for the banks.”

Benjamin, a fierce critic of municipal decline, points to the situation in Sheffield where a Private Finance Initiative contract with Amey to manage street trees resulted in thousands of mature, leafy ones at the roadside being needlessly felled “because the company worked out that it could make more profit by replacing them with saplings”. The latter require little maintenance.

He points out that the same street trees, in what is an unusually green city, are known to provide substantial physical and mental health benefits to residents, improve air quality and boost property values. The plan provoked outrage and led to protests by residents. Some found themselves arrested as they attempted to protect their streets and preserve their character.

“Many of our city parks and reserves are now being commercialised or privatised, because council funding has been slashed to the extent where town halls are facing bankruptcy in droves,” laments Benajamin.

Athwal’s commitment may yet be tested by the harsh reality he and his colleagues face. I’m well aware that Redbridge residents might yet have to battle to preserve oases such as Clayhall Park. Up to and including spending time in police cells as some of Sheffield’s peaceful protesters did? One would hope not.

For now we may just have to accept putting our hands in our pockets when the council next fixes its council tax. But the danger is all too real.