This Council notes that the cost-of-living crisis, food shortages, global conflict, climate change and the continued efforts to recover from the pandemic all impact upon food security, bringing an urgent focus on ensuring that residents have access to enough fresh food for day to day living.
This Council notes that the cost-of-living crisis, food shortages, global conflict, climate change and the continued efforts to recover from the pandemic all impact upon food security, bringing an urgent focus on ensuring that residents have access to enough fresh food for day to day living.
This Council notes:
- The increasing need to put the health and well-being of residents at the heart of our corporate strategies.
- The powerful evidence which demonstrates the link between people’s health and wellbeing and the availability of fresh locally produced food.
- That the cost-of-living crisis is creating real hunger reinforcing the need for healthy fresh food at an affordable price.
- That communities coming together to grow food can radically reduce costs to NHS and social care budgets by reducing loneliness and providing healthy food.
- That there is plenty of under-used publicly owned land which could be used for community food growing while also improving the public realm.
Council agrees to refer the following options to the Communities, Culture and Leisure Overview and Scrutiny Commission, for consideration of the following points in the next six months:
- Identify and produce a map of all Council owned land suitable for community cultivation that is publicly available at no cost to residents, and actively promoted across all wards.
- Land should be considered suitable for cultivation for food or biodiversity unless containing proven hazards or unless development is due within 24 months.
- Make this land available for cultivation by a simple license to community organisations at no cost.
- Ensure the license does not contain conditions that present a significant barrier to residents in terms of financial or practical requirements.
- Extend Council public liability to cover food growing projects on public realm land to release this requirement and cost from community groups.
- Ensure that where community groups cultivating on public realm land for food growing or wildlife spaces, the groups are given an opportunity to bid for the land should it be tendered to sale.
- Provide the necessary infrastructure such as access to water and/or water harvesting to enable sustainable cultivation for all.
- Ensure that allotment provision adheres to the 1969 Thorpe Report which recommends a minimum provision equivalent to 15 plots per 1,000 households. In the 2021 census, 115,500 households were recorded in Hull.
- Monitor and review allotment tenancies on an annual basis, actively enforcing removing allotments from tenants who have not cultivated their plot within the past 12 months or have breached the terms of their allotment agreement.
This Council further agrees to:
- Actively support and promote volunteering opportunities to the wider population to encourage them to get involved in community cultivation.
- Write to MPs who represent the Council area and ask them to support a national right to grow as articulated in Amendment 483 (Community Cultivation Schemes) in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill.
- Write to MPs who represent the Council area and ask them to support Mike Kane MP who is planning to submit a 10-minute rule bill for the Right to Grow.