Policy for Play

In doing what it can to survive difficult times, the play movement must not lower its sights to accept inadequate government policy, writes Adrian Voce

Six years ago this June a process began which culminated in me being asked, as the Director of Play England, by a Cabinet Office official for a list of the most important things that the Government could do for children’s play. This was one of those rare moments, as scarcely believable looking back on it as it seemed at the time. Soon after, the same official asked how much it would all cost, at which point even the fiercest self-pinching could not dispel the notion that I was in dreamland.

For several years (we) had been making the case for a national play strategy

For several years, those of us involved in campaigning for government action on play had been making the case for a national play strategy, with ring-fenced funding for provision. We also wanted a central policy unit to develop and implement the cross-cutting changes in planning, policing and traffic as well as education and childcare that we knew were necessary to dismantle the many barriers to children’s freedom to play outside.

For just as many years, these demands had been made to seem like a fantastical wish-list, not just by a government which equated the “enjoy” part of “enjoy and achieve” – one of the five universal outcomes for its Every Child Matters policy – with children being happy at school, but by some of our supposed allies in the more established children’s sector who made it clear they saw our earlier “day in the sun” – the £155m Children’s Play lottery programme – as a more than ample dispensation.

Brown talked about “engaging parents…to find the best balance between care, education and play”

In June 2007 this all changed. Two years before achieving his long-held ambition to succeed Tony Blair as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in the run up to the 2005 election, had declared Labour’s next term as being one that would put children first. Nothing especially new or hopeful for play advocates there, but, writing in The Guardian in January 2005, Brown talked about “engaging parents…to find the best balance between care, education and play”. This was a distinct shift from the long-running mantra of “education; education; education”.

There are no accidental words in such political writings and, sure enough, there followed the first ever manifesto pledge on children’s play. It was vague enough to not amount to much more than the lottery funding already promised, but was an all-important wedge, allowing us to engage in a new level of policy dialogue once Labour was reelected.

What happened in the three years that followed Brown’s succession in 2007 is history; and by most reckonings a calamitous one, culminating in May 2010 with Labour’s defeat after 13 years in power. But Brown’s short, ill-fated administration began very differently, with a renewed optimism sweeping through the government ranks as he set about renewing the New Labour project from the vantage point of initially commanding poll ratings.

It was in this first flush of Prime Minister Brown’s ascendancy, over the summer of 2007, that we seized the opportunity represented by the manifesto pledge (which we knew had come from his camp) to press the case for a national play strategy, duly announced by Brown’s leading ally and now Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, that December.

Then Children’s Secretary Ed Balls’ launches the Play Strategy in March 2008.

It was, of course, during the time from June to December 2007 that I was asked those £225m questions (and it would be naïve to imagine we were the only ones being asked: my wish-list certainly didn’t allocate nearly £200m to fixed equipment playgrounds). This was part of an intense, almost daily dialogue with a small number of officials charged with drafting what was to be the new Children’s Plan, an ambitious 10 year strategy, building on the progress of Every Child Matters,  “to make England the best place in the world to grow up”. For the first time ever – and possibly anywhere – space and opportunity for play was to be at the heart of the new vision.

today’s play policy, if it exists at all, seems to be a minor adjunct to the coalition government’s aim to mobilise armies of volunteers to deliver what used to be public services

Currently, there would appear to be next to no chance of any of the main parties asking the play sector what it wants from a major policy initiative. Far from a ten-year play strategy, primed with nearly £400m of lottery and treasury money, today’s play policy, if it exists at all, seems to be a minor adjunct to the coalition government’s aim to mobilise armies of volunteers to deliver what used to be public services.

Yet the context for developing a new case for national play policy is in some ways now more helpful than it was in 2007. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has issued a General Comment, expanding upon article 31 of its Convention on the Rights of the Child, to explicitly call on governments to introduce legislation and allocate budgets “to respect, fulfil, and protect the right to play”. Our nearest neighbour, Wales, is already there, with its play sufficiency duty being described in an independent analysis by the University of Gloucestershire as a “bold step into what is potentially a new landscape for government understanding about children’s play”.

More immediate factors – economic and political ones – are, of course, profoundly unfavourable. The pervading view that austerity means not just cutting back spending on play, but in many areas cutting it out altogether,  is so insidious that we almost seem to have come to accept it ourselves.

A pragmatic acceptance of the need to protect whatever capacity we can within the current climate is not mutually exclusive to campaigning for a more helpful one

It is true that we are a long way from receiving a credible hearing for a new wish list of the kind we presented in 2007, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be developing one. A pragmatic acceptance of the need to provide support, to build and protect whatever capacity we can within the current climate of cuts and closures, is not mutually exclusive to marshalling the evidence and growing the campaign for a more helpful one. The case for a national play strategy was first seriously articulated some six years before Ed Balls’ announcement that December. We had made the case, but it took all of that time to win the argument.

It may be that this government is not listening to anything that can’t help in its mission to save money and shrink the role of the state. But we are only two years away from a general election, which no one other than government spin-doctors (and not even all of them) is predicting either coalition partner will win. Meanwhile, there are serious and influential voices on the Labour side calling for a proper alternative to austerity. And Ed Balls is now the Shadow Chancellor.

These are the voices we should be engaging with. There is all to play for.

Adrian Voce

A family company in Germany shows how fixed equipment can rise to the challenge of play

To some play activists, the playground equipment industry is a bête noire; to blame for the poor quality of children’s play areas that became the norm over the last 50 years.  The play movement has rightly decried the “kit fence and carpet” (KFC) playgrounds that came to typify the risk averse, mass-produced approach to what should be a design challenge to fire the imagination. Manufacturers, many argue, must shoulder their responsibility: providers, after all, can only procure what is being offered by the industry.

The equipment companies counter that they only supply what their customers, mainly local authorities, demand and that, in any event, swings, roundabouts and standardised climbing frames (if not springy chickens) have stood the test of time.

“Local authorities argue that they have little choice but to erect cost-efficient, low maintenance kit”

Local authorities, for their part, argue that, except for a brief period during the latter part of the last Labour administration – when there was a national Play Strategy and ring-fenced government funding for play –their limited budgets and lack of any national guidance on play left them little choice but to erect cost-efficient, low maintenance kit.

As usual, there is validity to both sides of this argument and there are those who say say that the benchmark for public playgrounds, the Six Acre Standard has tended to encourage this approach; reducing the spatial standards per capita for play to a quota of fixed equipment installations.

Are you bored yet?

Add the perspective of playworkers – who know that the best play affordance is not found in fixed equipment at all, but in the opportunity to construct, manipulate and, yes, destroy the play environment in the organic, place-shaping co-creation that is most possible in adventure playgrounds – and the manufacturers were always going to come in for some stick.

“when did we decide that the best outdoor space for children should be a flat, fenced-in area, covered with synthetic material?”

In truth, whatever the conspiracy of different factors, the poor state of our children’s playgrounds – which have improved since the Play Strategy, but still have some way to go – betrays the lowly status of children’s play within the general discourse about the public realm and what constitutes “liveability”. It is hard to think of anything else which so clearly needs a societal response (children not having access to the market), yet which has received, until recently, so little attention from social policy. It is equally difficult to imagine any other category of public space that so frequently dispenses with a proper plan, let alone a design concept, and moves straight to the selection of fixtures. When did we decide that the best outdoor space for children should be a flat, fenced-in area, covered with synthetic material and erected with a limited variety of immovable, single-function apparatus?

“real adventure playgrounds … were always out of reach to all but a very small minority of the child population”

Sadly, the much better response to children’s need to play, real adventure playgrounds (staffed with playworkers and animated with loose parts, the elements and self-built structures), even at their most prolific, numbered probably less than 250 across the UK, which means they were always out of reach to all but a very small minority of the child population.

The Play Strategy set about creating 30 new ones in a pathfinder programme that would have seen the best of these replicated across every local authority area … had it survived the coalition’s cull. But now, of course, they are being torn down – or at risk of being so; and the attempt to raise the bar for un-staffed play areas (I dislike the “term fixed-equipment playgrounds” as it perpetuates the notion that play areas are all about kit) through guidance, professional training, monitoring and evaluation has also been binned along with the rest of the Play Strategy.

“sadly for children, they get the playgrounds that we deserve”

Market forces will always move to fill gaps; and when the demand side (local authorities) has no incentive to discover and respond to what the end user (children) really need, the result is inevitable. Sadly for children, they get the playgrounds that we deserve.

But, just as we can’t blame the equipment industry for the dearth of policy or the lack of revenue streams that would allow adventure playgrounds to flourish, it would also be a mistake to think that there are not equipment manufacturers with a real passion and commitment to children’s play, with products to match.

Company founder Julian Richter…and his beloved larch

One such is the Richter Spielgeräte company in Bavaria, Germany. Founded by the charismatic Julian Richter in the 60s, the company (now partly managed by his son, Julian Junior) is built on strong principles that reflect a real love of the beauty and energy of playing children. Richter’s strong belief in engendering self-determination has seen it buck the trend for low-risk, low-affordance equipment in favour of designs that respect children’s need to take risks, make choices and manipulate their play environment. More than this, the company’s espousal of traditional craftsmanship means that every piece is uniquely fashioned by carpenters, whose expertise and respect for the wood they use – Mountain Larch from environmentally sustainable forests in the Austrian Alps – is evident in the finished product.

“natural materials, better landscaping and a disavowal of rubber surfacing”

Richter’s sole UK distributor, Timberplay share their partner’s commitment to play value and were one of the companies happy to embrace the new design principles published by Play England as part of the Play Strategy. Natural materials, better landscaping and a disavowal of rubber surfacing and unnecessary fencing were far from alien steps to this UK company. Its MD, Paul Collings had seen in Richter’s use of unshaped logs and hand-planed beams, a quality product that responded to the nature of play more than the highly machined, brightly painted metalwork that had become the norm.

“the talk is of play with the elements, of risk and challenge, play value and play types”

Collings is quite happy to acknowledge that a good play space need not involve equipment at all. This is no mere reverse psychology or part of a simply more sophisticated sales pitch. The company organizes study tours to Bavaria and other places, which are joined largely by landscape architects, designers and students. Here the talk is of play with the elements, of risk and challenge, play value and play types. The playgrounds visited are, of course, animated by Richter designs but the company seems genuinely to see itself as promoting the cross-pollination of creative thinking in architecture, landscaping, design, traditional craftsmanship and manufacturing: all in the service of creating great places to play.

Handcrafted timber in bespoke designs and landscaped settings
Photo: Ben Harbottle/Timberplay

The business of creating playable space shouldn’t begin or end with playgrounds – and certainly not with equipment – but as things stand they are the main type of provision, and likely to remain so until play services receive revenue budgets more equivalent to those enjoyed by schools, and we have a sustained play strategy that really does transform the built environment and its access to open space for children. When that day comes, perhaps we will see the likes of Richter and Timberplay animating not just our playgrounds, but all our public places.

Adrian Voce

The Flourish Summit, organised by the Save Childhood Movement in London last weekend, presented an impressive array of writers, academics, researchers and practitioners, all talking about what the latest research tells us of the state of modern childhood, and how we should aim to improve it. Adrian Voce noticed a common theme…

There were psychologists and neurologists, psychiatrists and teachers, philosophers and kings (I made the last one up, but I did spot a Baroness!) With such a diverse collection of eminent thinkers speaking to such a broad topic, one might expect a wide range of different analyses and solutions. Yet there was a surprising degree of convergence around one major issue. And the word that came up over and over again was play. “Children aren’t getting enough of it and this is a serious problem”, was the almost universal theme throughout the two-day event.

Where next for play policy?

The causes were slightly more controversial. The ubiquitous presence of electronic screens in children’s lives came in for serious condemnation from some, less from others. Poor planning, unfettered traffic, inequality, paranoid parenting and rapacious marketing all came in for their share of blame for the range of poor outcomes for Britain’s children. But over and over again the solutions were the same. After basic loving care and boundaries, what children from the earliest age need most is play, play and more (outdoor) play.

Support for street play

In spite of this, there were, sadly, no play academics as such on the programme. Tim Gill, once of the Children’s Play Council, spoke of the recent gains in rolling back an oppressively risk averse culture, especially in playground design, while Cath Prisk of Play England had some good news about government funding to support street play. But against these modest advances the repeated, often heartfelt calls from educationists and others for children to be given more time and more space for free, outdoor play – in and out of school and nursery – was the most striking thing about the event.

Many speakers roundly criticised education policy – not just the current government’s but longer-term trends in general, especially for the early years. This was perhaps unsurprising given the links that this movement has with the Open Eye campaign. Dr. Richard House, of the University of Winchester, an Open Eye founder, only half-jokingly called for a campaign of ‘principled non-compliance’ in the face of a government that has dismissed the importance of free play, saying ‘there is revolution in the air’. Others echoed the cry.

Even Baroness Greenfield, the Oxford Professor who has controversially linked excessive screen-time to ADHD and even autism, effectively called for a national play strategy saying, “it is not enough to try and restrict access to screens: we must create a more attractive alternative”. Now where have I heard that before?

Play Strategy

The Flourish Summit was like 2007 revisited. It was then that a similar list of the great and good from academia, politics and literature wrote to the Daily Telegraph demanding the government to act to protect shrinking childhoods and ‘let our children play’. The wave of support for action on play that swelled up around that time enabled us to amplify our case for a serious national play policy in England and for those campaigning for it to extend beyond the play movement. This gave us the extra momentum that took us all the way to the Play Strategy we had been campaigning for for nearly a decade and which, if it hadn’t been for the change of government, would now be into its sixth year.

The Play Strategy set out over twelve years to transform our public realm, making all neighbourhoods into child-friendly places, perceived to be safe by parents, seen as fit for play by children; and building a new generation of play areas and adventure playgrounds designed for children rather than the maintenance budget or the health and safety officer. These are just the kinds of response now being called for with even greater urgency by those best qualified to know the consequences of not acting.

Many other, non-governmental agencies have taken up the challenge since the plug was pulled. We heard yesterday from the National Trust, for example, whose Wild Network and Project Wild Thing are turning the flair of streetwise marketing ‘creatives’ to the task of selling the outdoors to children. Playing Out, conversely, is a grass roots parents’ movement aiming to help others to arrange regular play days in their own streets by the simple means of closing them off to traffic, which is not as easy as it sounds. Play England’s new Health funding will deservedly see resources going into helping this inspiring project to grow.

Making the case – again

There are many more examples. Providing for children’s play is a self-evident need for any community and the resourceful ones will always find a way to do it, whilst intelligent organisations like the NT will see their responsibility for it too. But the need for space – accessible, everyday, ideally natural space – for all children to play is so universal and so acute that only the government can really command the resources and marshal the sectors that need to respond sufficiently to have the impact that is needed. This government may not be interested in a play strategy, even of a different hue – certainly not one led by what used to be the Department for Children and is now very much the Department for Education – but the case for one is stronger than ever; and we are only two years away from an election.

The play movement, especially the playwork sector, which is facing decimation as the impact of austerity cuts swathes through local play services, is asking itself at the moment, “where do we go next, what do we need to do to protect play provision, to fight for playwork?”

The answer, if we believe space for play is a societal responsibility, must always be in policy. It’s way past time for the case to be made for a new Play Strategy.

Adrian Voce

The Save Childhood Movement is launching the first National Children’s Day on 15th May 

www.nationalchildrensdaysdayuk.com 

Thatcherism diminishes the role of the state in supporting communities where children can play

Within Thatcher’s legacy of a help-yourself culture with ”no such thing as society”, there is little room for play policy. This aspect of Thatcherism is alive and well in today’s government and speaking out, writes Adrian Voce, is the only rational response.

The death of Baroness Thatcher has given rise to more reflection, analysis and comment than that of any British politician since Churchill.  A major figure who changed the history of our country – some have called her the greatest peacetime Prime Minister since Gladstone – she was also one of the most divisive, and her capacity to polarise opinion is undiminished. For every tribute, there has been an indictment. She took no prisoners: you were either for or against her. To the Murdoch empire, she was a “symbol of liberty and strength”, to the Guardian “her legacy is public division, private selfishness and a culture of greed”.

I wrote here a couple of weeks ago about the need for our policy positions – the making of our case for play provision and playable space – to be non-aligned to any broad political ideology. Yet, within the UK children’s play movement there is a seemingly unquestioned consensus that Thatcher’s influence was, and is toxic. Many are openly celebrating her demise.  The New Labour years of Blair and Brown do not command a consensus of endorsement from play campaigners by any means, but Thatcherism is almost universally regarded as the antithesis of what we stand for.

Why is this so? What is it about wanting to provide for children’s right to play that so unequivocally sets us against the free-market economics and right wing politics of Thatcher’s conservatism?

More Ball Games?

Many aspects of the play agenda – greater freedom for children, a less risk-averse approach to provision and a return to more traditional “free-range” childhoods – are, at least superficially, highly sympathetic to modern British conservatism.  And so it was not just the Labour government that adopted play as a serious new policy area in the noughties. In 2007-8 – at the same time that the idea of a national play strategy was taking hold with a newly restructured Department for Children under Ed Balls – as director of Play England I was not only advising Balls’ team but also that of David Willets, the shadow minister who was drafting his party’s new child policy review. The resultant More Ball Games (which also had Tim Gill as an advisor) contained much that the play sector could welcome.

On closer examination, however, the document is revealed as opportunistic, cynical even. Keen to be seen to respond to the concerns about “shrinking childhoods” that had been part of the zeitgeist for a couple of years – from front page headlines in the Sun to academic letters to the Telegraph – the Tories, ahead of the emerging play policy being developed by Balls, were clearly aiming to steal the government’s thunder.

By calling for a return to traditional, “three-dimensional” (as opposed to screen-based) play, “everyday adventures” and “free-range childhoods”, they were tapping into growing concerns about the sedentary, indoor lives that were coming to be seen as a big factor in the childhood obesity epidemic, and much else besides. They also knew this would play well to their heartlands, resonating with the nostalgic idylls of middle England where children play conkers in leafy gardens, scrape their knees climbing trees and play out until dusk with not a Health and Safety regulation in sight.

In fact, More Ball Games proposed nothing material other than a review of Health and Safety law and a sideswipe at European standards for fixed equipment. If you believed the rhetoric, these favourite Tory whipping boys – regulation and Europe – were the real culprits, not the traffic, crime, commercial domination of planning or lack of investment in community play provision that the evidence suggested. When challenged at its launch about what more a Conservative Government would do about “battery-reared” children David Cameron let slip his party’s true position: this was not really the territory for central government. He would, instead, “free up” parents and local areas to respond in their own way.

Although Cameron, at that stage, fell short of describing play policy as symptomatic of the “nanny state” (he could hardly do anything else at the launch of what was the closest his party got to one), the message was clear. Responding to barriers to children’s play was part of the “big government” that he would be rolling back. And so it proved.

“Nanny State”

This laissez-faire strain of conservative thinking has always been there but had been held in check by the more patriarchal, One Nation Tories until the Thatcher revolution. It was the Iron Lady and her team who, if they did not coin it, certainly popularized the term “nanny state” as the antithesis of the unshackled free market economy in which there was “no such thing as society” (with the implication that there was scant need for much social policy). Dissenters were known as “wets” and did not last long in her government.

Contrast this with the Labour Government thinking that led eventually to the Play Strategy. Writing for the left-of centre think-tank, Compass in 2007, David Lammy, who as a culture minister had children’s play in his portfolio, was clear about “the limits of the market” in supporting children and families. Highlighting the UK’s poor showing (bottom) in that year’s UNICEF  child-wellbeing table of wealthy nations, he compared Britain to Holland (top), where the Home Zone concept was created and “free range” children were the norm. “We need to embed the concept of child friendly planning … within our own policies for the built environment and open spaces”, he said. “Children should be central to spatial planning principles and playable landscapes, not just the beneficiaries of the occasional playground”.

Compared to the similar rhetoric about conkers and climbing trees, here was the real difference between the main parties. Labour, recognising that even the children of affluent families are not independent players in the market but “need to have a real stake in the common spaces of their neighbourhoods”, would need the power of the state to calm the traffic, redesign public spaces and police the low level crime that was keeping children indoors. This thinking led quite logically to an ambitious ten-year strategy to create a playable, child-friendly public realm across England. The Conservative thinking, just as inevitably, led to the underwhelming policy breakthrough of a “High Level Statement” by the Health and Safety Executive about the value of risk-benefit assessments. Oh, and an abandonment of the Play Strategy and an end to ring-fenced funding for new provision.

Inequality

This week, free play advocates shed no tears for Margaret Thatcher: because her government’s policies massively increased the economic inequality that still sees so many children growing up in poverty and play deprivation; because it was her regime that introduced market forces into public services, brining to an end the culture of local authority grants on which so many adventure playgrounds and other community play projects had depended; and because her administration gave birth to the childcare industry which would subvert so much play provision to the needs of the economy.

More instinctively though, play advocates loathed and dreaded Thatcher because the notion of community – of “it takes a village to raise a child” – was not just alien to her: she was contemptuous of it. For most of us, a fighting response was the only civilized one.

Why this all matters more than 20 years after her departure from government, is that Thatcher may have gone but her legacy is alive and well. The “Big Society” disguise for Cameron and Osborne’s true mission to “roll back the frontiers of the state”, like the good Thatcherites they are, has long since been thrown. A national children’s play policy of any substance has no hope with a government as keen to devolve, deregulate and dismantle as this one. The Lib Dems would have us believe they are a counterbalancing force, but as an illustration of how effectively, just ask what happened to the Task Force that Nick Clegg announced in 2010 “to find new solutions … to the need for spaces where children can play”, of which nothing has been heard since.

Common decency should give us pause – dancing on graves is not for us – but speaking out clearly against what Margaret Thatcher stood for, at a time when she is being lionised by her successors and canonised by the right wing press, is as important as ever.

Adrian Voce

Last year Adrian Voce worked with Islington Play Association on its project to secure land for adventure playgrounds in the inner London borough. Here, he describes the work and its outcome – and why finding such a solution to this issue has never been more important.

It is not just benefit recipients for whom 1 April dawned this year like the cruelest of jokes. As the Conservative-led coalition government ushers in a new era of unprecedented reductions in the role and capacity of the state to help those in need – a chilling landmark which many see as the end of the Welfare State as we know it – many millions of people who use or work in public or voluntary sector services are deeply anxious about what the future holds.

With more than 50 per cent of local authorities making cuts to, or outsourcing, children’s and youth services, following on from the ending of ring-fenced government funding for play in 2010, there is no doubt that the sector is suffering. Although a clear national picture is hard to find it is clear that play services and play spaces are taking a bigger hit than most.

In trying to resist these cuts most of the focus has naturally tended to fall on funding. It is for economic reasons that services are being closed and playgrounds torn down, with councils no longer believing they have the revenue to maintain them. Alternative business models, new funding sources and the potential of social enterprise schemes to help keep play projects open are the order of the day. Having enjoyed all too few days in the sun before the new government tore up the play strategy – and our hopes of a sustained period of growth with it – the sector now has to find new ways to fund itself.

But biting cuts to local authority budgets are not the only effect of the coalition government’s mission to shrink the role of the state that will impact on play provision. Indeed one new policy change effective from 1 April has a potentially longer-term and even more seriously harmful effect on the nation’s children than the funding drought (which will, we have to hope, ultimately come to an end).

“This change is forever”

Simon Jenkins has written in the Guardian about the new National Planning Policy Framework, the slim-line document published in March 2012, but effective from this week, designed to free up the planning system in favour of “sustainable development”. Replacing a comprehensive range (over 1000 pages) of planning policy statements and guidance with a mere 50, Jenkins believes that the document, originally intended to simplify and clarify an overcomplicated and opaque system, was greatly influenced by “the developer lobby hijacking an important but emotive policy on housing” and that “its purpose is (now) brutally simple: to release for potential building the 60% of England’s land area that is unprotected countryside”.  Once implemented, he warns,  “this change is forever”.

Whilst the effect of this drastic new approach may be most visibly on the countryside, the massive easing up of planning regulations in favour of development also makes more vulnerable those pockets of land in towns and cities which may currently be in community use. Commonly without proper deeds of title or secure long-term-term leases, community projects like adventure playgrounds are therefore not only at risk from the squeeze on local authority revenue budgets, but from newly liberated developers, who will see easy pickings in many local authorities’ community land portfolios, just as the councils themselves will be under pressure to realise their assets. Add to the mix the fact that many have yet to produce the local plans required of them under the Localism Bill and we are looking at a perfect storm for community play. Adventure playgrounds, because they mostly occupy sizeable inner city sites, are particularly at risk.

Islington Play Association (IPA), in the north inner-London borough with the least open space – and the most adventure playgrounds – of any local authority area in the country, has found a solution.

Deed of Dedication

In June 2012 the local charity, then celebrating 40 years of supporting community play provision, especially the voluntary managed adventure playgrounds, in the borough, announced that the council had adopted a new legal instrument known as a Deed of Dedication for each of Islington’s 12 adventure playgrounds. Appended to the land title documents and therefore applicable to all leasehold agreements, the deed defines a restricted – or “dedicated” – use for the land, in this case children’s free adventure play, and prevents any other use being made of it “in perpetuity”, without the consent of all parties.

Islington children’s adventure playgrounds are now legally safeguarded “in perpetuity”. Photo: IPA

The dedication is safeguarded by assigning its custody to a third party – in this case Fields in Trust (formerly the National Playing Fields Association), whose written consent is required before the land can be used for any other purpose. Thus, whatever arrangements may evolve (or dissolve) between the landholder (the council) and the leaseholder (the service provider), the adventure playgrounds must remain as such. Fields in Trust has no interest in the title other than safeguarding the dedicated use. As a charity of over 100 years standing, the playgrounds are therefore in safe hands.

IPA was keenly aware of the growing threat to the treasured adventure playgrounds from the dire economic circumstances and the pressure on land in such a crowded and upwardly mobile part of inner London. With funding from the City Bridge Trust, it had researched the issue for two years – first looking at the feasibility of the council being persuaded to invoke community asset transfer powers to move the land into a bespoke community land trust, but eventually settling for this less cumbersome solution.

One immediate consequence was that IPA was left free to bid for, and win a new service provider contract for the voluntary managed playgrounds, as it announced in February. Becoming a Play Land Trust would have meant it taking on landlord status for the playground sites, thus potentially ruling it out of also becoming the service provider. With the council determined to find a single provider, compared to the several small and unsustainable voluntary management committees that were in place, this itself was a good result: the voluntary organisation with the best experience of, and closest ties to the adventure playgrounds is now running them.

Desirable assets

The longer-term consequence is even more important. Because Islington’s adventure playgrounds no longer occupy prime real estate in one of the most desirable parts of the capital – the assets being now effectively devalued by the highly restrictive deeds – they are doubly protected for play for the foreseeable future. This should make long-term leases much easier to negotiate and ambitious fundraising plans, capital grants or social enterprise business models more achievable: an elegant and very timely outcome, just as the coalition government’s love of burning “red-tape” would otherwise have given the green-light to businesses for whom children’s right to play is an inconvenient irrelevance.

Adrian Voce