From Guidance To Rule Book

 

I have been working on this for a while but as the weather has not been great and I have been having my stairlift and hospital bed serviced over the last few days I have been working on getting the London Borough of Sutton Allotment Gardener's Guide converted to a more Rule Book style format. 

Some may ask why are you doing this? Basically it was acknowledged at the last site reps meeting that the Guide needed some attention and it was more guidance about how to grow rather than what the rules are. 

The format and language needs to be more clear on what is and isn't acceptable and idverde have produced a number of more concise documents outlining the expectations in the first three months of ownership where an inspection will now take place to see if the new plot holder has achieved at least 25% cultivation of their plots.  They have also introduced different forms of notices as a result of the site inspections, and have better documented the practices, procedures and protocols.

These documents need to be incorporated into the current guide and a name change to Rules is a more accurate description of the new format. Information about crop rotation and gardening has been removed and its now more focused on allotment rules and allotment plot management and expectations from the site inspections. 

Jane from idverde does not have the time to merge all the documents she has produced into a new version where each section is numbered and each paragraph or rule is referenced. I updated the old guide when the London Borough of Sutton first appointed idverde to manage the allotments in 2017 and I'm happy to undertake this task as I'm now retired and have the time.  

I handed the source document over too the Parks Department in 2018 and they had done very little to it other than broaden the role of site representatives. They did make minor alterations during the Covid years but there were not discussed at the annual meeting or voted on buy all the stakeholders or their representatives. 

Various topics were discussed briefly at our 2024 meeting and minutes were produced but no formal vote or specifics were ironed out. A couple of years ago the council could not even be bothered to produce minutes.

I feel that all site representatives should have an opportunity to be involved in any modification to the document and thus I have created a closed Facebook Group specifically for all the London Borough of Sutton site reps and Jane from idverde so that we can discuss and make modifications to the document, before we offer it to the London Borough for a final review and rubber stamping.  

The format of the new version of the AGG is such that each section now has a unique number and each clause has a reference, for ease of reference when discussing and using the document. 

Below is an example of the new format 

The rules are in Black 

Guidance is italic and in Mauve