November newsletter

Orkastrate, the Council’s new records system for allotments

Committee members are quite often asked by tenants “There’s a plot near me, which has been unattended for some time now. Why hasn’t it been let?” or “I’ve had my plot for over a year now, but still haven’t been billed?”

These are very good questions, and this is the reason:

The tenancy contract is between tenant and Council, but owing to its Local Management Agreement, a PPAA Committee member – usually the Site Representative – attends to the practicalities of letting vacant plots to new tenants. Clearly, before this can be done, the volunteer needs to be certain that the plot is actually vacant. That is, that the former tenancy has been conclusively dissolved. This is where the difficulty presently lies.

The previous system for managing tenancies has been ended. It used to involve the Council’s Allotments Officer keeping files of waiting lists, vacancies, tenancies of plots etc., for all of Cardiff’s sites. She was dependent on Site Reps sending the details of new tenancies, non-cultivation, and so on, to keep these files updated. At regular intervals the updated files would then be shared with Site Reps across Cardiff, enabling them to let the vacant plots to people on the Waiting List for their site.

These files stopped being updated around summer 2024, and the data is being transferred to the new system. In principle, when it’s fully implemented, it should be very good, with Site Reps able to access and to update the system in real time on the devices issued by the Council. However, everyone’s asked to understand, that – in the context of budgetary strictures – the Council only have one officer for Allotments, who has to deal with over three thousand tenancies. It will therefore take some time to transfer the data for all sites to the new system, and this will happen far sooner for some than for others. The greater problem though, is perhaps that even once this is done, that data will be typically eighteen months old, and a significant amount of it will no longer be correct.

Sue attended the Council’s Site Representatives’ meeting on Wednesday, and it emerged that owing to the understandable sense of urgency on the part of Site Reps, one-to-one sessions of a few hours are being arranged between Allotments Officer and the Rep for a given site. This is so that they can correct the Council’s obsolete data – from their personal records for their site – dating back to when the Council stopped updating the files on the previous system. Sue intends to arrange such a meeting in due course for PPA. Much of her work will involve updating the records, to show the tenancies of plots, which have been let since summer 2024, and to enable their holders finally to be billed.

(It also needs to be borne in mind, that even once this data is up-to-date, the system still won’t be fully accessible as “live” by Site Reps, but just be “read only” – for the time being at least.)

Doing our bit

Sustainable self-sufficiency in food is a very good thing for any country, and this article from Private Eye explains why maybe the most environmentally responsible and, indeed, patriotic thing, that those of use who are fortunate enough to have allotments can do, is to make the fullest and most productive use of them that we can.

PPA Website Team