Costs of management of allotments owned by Reading Boroughg Council, and specifically for Balmore Park allotments site.

The request was partially successful.

Dear Reading Borough Council,

Please provide me with the following information:
the amount RBC has spent on
a) management
b) services,
for
A) All allotment sites provided by RBC
B) Balmore Park alltments
in each of the last three years.

Please highlightany exceptional service costs, whwther because of cost or because of their unususal nature.

Yours faithfully,

Frank Parrish

FOI, CRT, Reading Borough Council



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Kind Regards

Customer Relations Team

0118 937 2905

FOIeng_GenMail,

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FOI, CRT, Reading Borough Council

Dear Mr Parrish

Please take this e-mail as an acknowledgement of your request for information under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (2000), received by Reading Borough Council on 22 August 2020. This has now been passed to the appropriate officer for a response.
In accordance with the Act, you can expect to receive a formal response to your enquiry by the 21 September 2020.

We may contact you prior to this date if we require further information from you or if we require longer than 20 working days in order to respond to you.

Yours sincerely

Mr N Bullough
Customer Relations Officer
Customer Relations Team| Directorate of Resources
Civic Office
Bridge Street
Reading Borough Council
RG1 2LU
0118 937 2726 (Internal ext 72726)
Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

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Dear FOI, CRT,
By law you should by now have responded to my request for information about allotment costs.
Would you please let me know when I can expect a response

Yours faithfully

Frank Parrish

FOI, CRT, Reading Borough Council

Dear Mr Parrish

Thank you for your email. I apologise for your FOI being overdue. I will chase up the team working on it.

Thank you for your patience.

Yours sincerely

Mr N Bullough
Customer Relations Officer
Customer Relations Team| Directorate of Resources
Civic Office
Bridge Street
Reading Borough Council
RG1 2LU
0118 937 2726 (Internal ext 72726)
Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

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Dear Reading Borough Council,
On 22 August I mader a FOI request for information regarding allotment costs incurred by the Council.
Your response is now now well overdue.
Please provide as much relevant informatio0n as is available within one week.
Unless I hear from you in this timescale I shall escalate my request to the Information Commissioner, pointing out that this information is directly relevant to a review of allotment rents and related matters , which you claim to have been carrying out for several months, and which, under your own timetable , youi are now due to report on.
Yours faithfully,

Frank Parrish

FOI, CRT, Reading Borough Council

Dear Mr Parrish

Thanks you for your email.

I agree it is well overdue. I apologise for the delay. I will chase this up.

Thank you for your patience.

Yours sincerely

Mr N Bullough
Customer Relations Officer
Customer Relations Team| Directorate of Resources
Civic Office
Bridge Street
Reading Borough Council
RG1 2LU
0118 937 2726 (Internal ext 72726)
Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

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Gillespie, Andy, Reading Borough Council

Dear Frank Parrish

 

Thank you for your recent request received in this office on 22^nd August
2020.

 

You have requested the following information under the provisions of the
Freedom of Information Act 2000:

 

Please provide me with the following information:

the amount RBC has spent on

          a) management

          b) services,

   for

          A) All  allotment sites provided by RBC

          B)  Balmore Park alltments

in each of the last three years.

 

Please highlightany exceptional service costs, whwther because of cost or
because of their unususal nature.

 

Our response is as follows:-

 

Please provide me with the following information:

the amount RBC has spent on

          a) management

          b) services,

   for

          A) All  allotment sites provided by RBC

          B)  Balmore Park alltments

in each of the last three years.

 

 A. Reading Borough Council does not separate out the costs relating to
the provision of its allotment service from the wider budget for the
grounds maintenance to all of its land, although it is possible to
estimate these which I have tried to do in the table below for the
last 3 years. Please be aware that the management costs do not include
waste disposal as it is not possible to separate these out from the
much wider total waste disposal costs for all functions of the Parks
Team, which manages Reading’s allotment service. The service costs are
accurate as they are extracted from actual payment transactions
specifically for allotment sites.

 

2019/20 £ 2018/19   2017/18  
Management Management
Management Costs 50,289.95 Costs 49,851.06 Costs 48,930.58
Services Services
Services (water, (water, (water,
repairs etc) 12,421.76 repairs etc) 23,468.97 repairs etc) 11,923.34

 

 B. It is not possible to separate out costs for Balmore Allotments from
the management of the Reading’s 20 allotment sites.

 

Please highlightany exceptional service costs, whwther because of cost or
because of their unususal nature. None

 

You are free to use any information supplied to you for your own personal
purposes or for non-commercial research, private study or news reporting.
However, you do not have the right to re-use the information in a way
which infringes copyright, for example, by distributing, making copies of
or publishing the information, without the permission of the copyright
holder, which in most cases will be Reading Borough Council. If you wish
to obtain permission for such use, please contact Mr M Graham, Assistant
Director of Legal and Democratic Services, at Reading Borough Council.

 

Please note that your request may itself be the subject of a FOI request
and will be disclosed in that event.

 

If you are unhappy with this response to your request for information
under the Freedom of Information Act then you may ask for an internal
review. Please make a request in writing to Mr M Graham, Assistant
Director of Legal and Democratic Services, at Reading Borough Council.  If
you request such a review and are not content with its outcome, then you
have a right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a
decision.  The Information Commissioner can be contacted at:

 

Information Commissioner’s Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

 

Andy Gillespie

Parks & Open Spaces Manager

The information in this e-mail is confidential to the intended recipient to whom it has been addressed and may be covered by legal professional privilege and protected by law. Reading Borough Council does not accept responsibility for any unauthorised amendment made to the contents of this e-mail following its dispatch. If received in error, you must not retain the message or disclose its contents to anyone. Please notify us immediately quoting the name of the sender and the addressee and then delete the e-mail. Reading Borough Council has scanned for viruses. However, it is your responsibility to scan the e-mail and attachments (if any) for viruses. Reading Borough Council also operates to the Protective Document Marking Standard as defined for the Public Sector. Recipients should ensure protectively marked emails and documents are handled in accordance with this standard (Re: Cabinet Office - Government Security Classification).

Thank you. It is disappointing, but not surprising that you do not have the information.
I would have thought such data to be basic and essential if, as you claim, you are carrying out a rental review based on the costs of providing allotments.
When I hear about the Council's intentions regarding rentals I may request further information.

Frank Parrish

Gillespie, Andy, Reading Borough Council

Dear Mr Parrish

Thank you for this.

I am sorry that it took so long to get back to you but my response required a trawl through many thousands of lines of budget data which was time consuming. We do collect and calculate detailed budget information for a variety of reasons but because of the diversity of the team's operations, cannot always provide exact answers for specific requests about our services. We get quite a few of these and no two are the same.

Having said that, I found it somewhat useful to think about your request as it highlighted some areas which may be helpful in the future, some obvious and some less so.

Of course, I am happy to try to provide you with information where I can.

Kind regards

Andy

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