Proposed changes to Bristol Allotment Rent and Tenancy Agreement

Bristol City Council’s Parks Service manages 227 hectares of food growing land (much of which is protected under the Allotment Act). Within this land, the council manages over 4,000 allotment plots, with an additional 1,500 plots managed by five Allotment Associations on behalf of the council. The significant potential for growing healthy and sustainable food makes allotments an important priority. Since the adoption of our last Allotments Strategy in 2009, interest in food growing – both nationally and locally – has surged - a trend which accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This rise in interest has seen allotment waiting lists grow to almost 8,000 people. This increase requires a shift from predominantly focussing on the improvement of allotments sites, to considering how we can increase access to food growing opportunities.

Whether it is strengthening our approach to sustainable food growing or ensuring that more communities can access food growing opportunities, the Food Growing and Allotments Strategy plays a critical part in delivering the six other strategic priorities outlined in the Parks and Green Spaces Strategy.

Allotment rents in Bristol have not been reviewed since 2018. To simply maintain services at existing levels we need to increase rents to cover rising costs, look after an increased number of tenants and cover the demands on the service.

Increased rent proposal
We aspire to go further than just maintaining the current service, as we want to improve the offer to our tenants and work towards increasing the number of plots available to those on the waiting list.

We can do this by:

• Employing an additional Allotment Officer
• Improving maintenance and repairs delivered across the sites
• Issuing clearer communications
• Carrying out better tenancy management
• Restoring overgrown abandoned plots

To meet the cost of these service improvements, we propose increasing the rent to align with other similar sized local authorities, and charging for service requests that are not part of the standard allotment tenancy.