Rent rises?

[Si]

Anyone else threatened with rent rises due to the recession?

They want to put ours up by 60% next year.  At the same time they are tightening up on the services that they suply.  For instance, water will be rationed - if we use over a certain amount then it's cut off.  There is a limit of £40k for the whole city's water spending on allotments - several sites, by themselves, managed £20k last year!  The toilets on the site belong to the council and are bust, but they will not fix them either.  They are also cutting back on grass cutting and will do nothing about our damaged and substandard fence.  But because the fence is council property we are not allowed to do anything with it either.

TBH, if it does go up by 60% then we'll still be paying less than many (another good reason for not living in That London  ) but to have to pay so much more for a reduced service is still going to be a bit of a pain.


Anyone else suffering likewise?

[ScumOfTheRoad]

Bet the Council isn't cutting back on the Mayoral limousine.

[Zoidburg]

The demographic has changed though.

With the middle classes slowly taking over the alotments the council have sussed that there is money to be made.

[border-rider]

With most councils looking to reduce budgets by millions, with their costs going up and their ability to raise council tax capped, there's going to be be lot more of these increases in charges in the next couple of years.

As ZB intimates, allotments are in demand and the "market" can probably comfortably stand the price hike.  It's sad, but its the way of things these days.

[Zoidburg]

Some buy to let type gits will get caught sub-letting them for profit.

You wait.

[jellied]

A few years back i was paying £30 a year for a council one [West London], I got one closer to home from a charity which was £60, last year it was £80 and this year it's £100.

Most apparently goes on water, but we get little else, security is poor, no toilets [no exactly true].

There's a petition going around asking to be told, but a lot of holders are nervous. The whole site is prime real estate. Several million pounds cash now, or a couple grand  a year from some smelly gardeners. Tricky choice.

[Si]

Ah well, with us they can't use the old prime real estate bluff.  Our site was about twice what it currently is.  Having contracted, half of it is just overgrown waste land - if they wanted to sell off the land then this would have to go first.

Have also found out that they will probably have to spend more to cut off the water than they would save - the same water feed is used for toilets and taps, they are not allowed to stop the supply to the toilets so they would have to dig the road up and put in a new water feed if they wanted to cut of just the taps 

But the idiocy of certain parts of the council were displayed well yesterday - one of the committee gave a report outlining how she'd been told by a man on the council that the water buts that we are selling at the allotment shop are banned on allotments.  Another committee member outlined a discussion with a council employee about how she'd been asked for the supplier of the buts so that he could recommend them to all the other sites.  Turned out that both committee members had been talking to the same man 

[Wobbly John]

Paid my allotment rent on Thursday and it hasn't gone up. 

I pay £20 pa for a 20 pole allotment (about 10 metres by 50 metres)

No water or security on our site though so water butts and hefty locks and booby-traps are the order of the day. 

Council is splitting allotments down to 10 poles to reduce waiting list.