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Bristol Parks Forum
National Open Spaces Forum
Hugh recently attended a meeting in Birmingham where it was agreed that this national group should be set up.
Greenspace Focus Group Meeting 8th March 2008
Report to Bristol Parks Forum
A short (3 hour) meeting held to develop ideas and contacts made at the 'Great Parks Great People' conference in September. 11 attendees from Liverpool, Birmingham, Sunderland, Nottingham County, Haringey, Hackney Stockport, and of course Bristol. The meeting consisted of two parts, the first and longest of which was each representative describing what was going on in their area. Full details will be placed on the Greenspace Community Forum website at some stage.
Points relevant to Bristol
1. We appear to be unique in enjoying the support of both officers and Councillors in trying to improve our Parks and open spaces. In most cases politicians in particular only pay lip service to the idea.Most of the others seem to have a slightly uneasy relationship with their Parks Depts, and don't appear to enjoy the sort of arms-length practical support from which we benefit.
2. Only Hackney and Bristol are not suffering continuous year-on -year budget cuts. This may however be because we started from a much lower base than the others, but it's difficult to tell as this information doesn't appear to be easily available in the other local authorities.
3. None of the others have a detailed P&GSS ,let alone one protected(?) by ring-fenced funding and adopted with the support of all three political parties. It's extraordinarily refreshing to go somewhere and Bristol is a national leader in something !
4. Birmingham is about to start reviewing it's maintenance contracts ,though under a significant budget cut. I was able to explain our experiences in this field. An important point is that a representative of their Forum will be part of the interviewing and appointing panel, with a particular interest in the contractor's intention to involve the local community. We would do well to learn from this.
The second part was essentially "Where do we go from here?"This generated considerable and occasionally heated discussion.Haringey in particular has visions of a highly organised network of regional Forums, meeting in a national one, and attracting enough political support to make financial demand at the very highest levels of government.We felt this could be slightly premature. In the end we agreed on a name , and a practical first step.
National Open Spaces Forum
This title was adopted at the end of this meeting as the one best describing what we were all there for . The eventual aim is to form a Forum of Forums , initially under the auspices of GreenSpace, to act both as a resource and a national campaigning body. In order for this to happen Greenspace will need to secure funding for a dedicated Community Action worker, and as an initial action it was agreed that representatives from Haringey, Birmingham and (probably) Nottingham would write a job description and work with Greenspace to secure this.All participants will be made aware of any progress. Further meetings will be held, possibly on a quarterly basis.
The agreed terms of reference for the NOSF can be found here
Hugh Holden. Bristol Parks Forum rep.
