Election lobbying starts here

Notes of London Green Spaces Friends Groups Network (LFGN)

This group represents about 500 London Friends of Parks groups. The main topic on the agenda was to prepare for the coming Local and MEP elections on the 15^th May. The final nominations have to be received by the 24^th April. As these are not GLA elections, but Borough and European, it was felt that each group needs to lobby its local candidates about local issues.

One of the key issues is to start campaigning to get funding for parks to be statutory. Currently with stretched budgets council’s have to protect funding of statutory services which means cut backs for parks and open spaces is inevitable. In Waltham Forest the Greenspace department was scrapped a couple of years ago and now there is no one person responsible for parks.

The LFGN thought a good lobbying issue was to ask the MEP candidates to change the Euro law to make park funding statutory. Another idea was to lobby council candidates, in wards where there are parks, and ask them to safeguard the funding. In addition it was suggested the new Community Infrastructure Levy money should be used for parks in the area that the development is taking place.

It is important to keep the profile of parks high on the political agenda otherwise they will become neglected and we will see all the good works of the last few years unravel. It is important all parks try and achieve a standard which currently is the Green Flag award.

Time ran out before the other major agenda item could be discussed. This concerns the larger parks like Hackney Marshes and Victoria Park which are used by huge pop concerts closing off most of the open space for weeks on end. This does huge environmental damage including noise pollution. This is another area to lobby candidates on to find ways of stopping local authorities seeing the open space as a cash cow.

Once again despite the huge area represented it was a very useful and enlightening meeting.