Friends of Hanley Park: Response to Stoke-on-Trent City Council Budget Proposals 2024

Dear Cllr Ashworth,

The Friends of Hanley Park is a small community organisation made up of local people, and with the support of our partners, we write to underline and share our concerns about the proposed reductions in staffing at the park, totalling £73,000 in the next financial year, and rising in future years. These cuts are to be achieved through the reduction of two Park Liaison Officers, who have been based in the heart of the park since Stoke-on-Trent City Council was awarded £4.5m lottery funding to restore our Grade II* listed park in 2016. They were, and are, a vital investment into community wellbeing.

Back then, the park had become tired, derelict and intimidating. Our community remembers that the pavilion and canal bridge were boarded up, and the canalside was often dominated by daytime drinkers gathering in large numbers. During community research, it became clear that many local people, especially women and girls, felt unsafe in the large, central areas of the park. Outside what is now the Community Hub, our volunteers would challenge drug dealing and use in plain sight, on a daily basis, when no-one else would.

In the past, concerns for the safety of vulnerable children and young people in the park were shared regularly (sadly these reports can still surface, if less often). Our founder and then-chair Carole Ware, along with her colleague Brenda Spencer, in their 70s and 80s, spent countless hours challenging behaviour and reporting concerns, clearing broken glass, urine, faeces and other paraphernalia. Their shared determination, plus a close working relationship with park staff and local policing teams, limited the escalation of these issues. But Friends of Hanley Park could not have addressed them more fully without the investment in staff and facilities that followed.

Today, we are fortunate to have a park that has come so far – one in which a key visitor frustration is the closure of the pavilion cafe rather than the extent of safety concerns. But we know progress is fragile. Hanley Park provides a stunning backdrop - as much to our city’s tourism offer as to campaigns to attract new foster carers. Challenges persist but positive change is measurable. This is thanks to the hard work of our PLOs, who work closely with the park’s Commercial Manager and maintenance team.

Attracting around 660,000 visits in 2016, footfall has now broken records, with 1 million annual visits logged in 2023. Accessible volunteering opportunities, directly supported by our PLOs, contributed 15,384 hours (or 641 days) to park maintenance in 2023, and this special place has never looked better. Our park now has more female than male visitors, a 10% reversal of the situation in 2015, and a wonderful barometer of change and a reflection of their efforts.

The staff presence in the park’s Community Hub is central to progress. In December, the queue for Christmas activities taking place there totalled 300, stretching all the way up the canal bridge, and in itself a tidy illustration of change. It isn’t unusual for these and other seemingly small PLO-led activities to attract between 50 and 200 children and families, without hitting their pockets in hard times. The Hub also provides an approachable and accessible meeting point for other groups, such as the Living Streets Walking Group, enabling older and vulnerable or disabled people to feel safe in the park – it is they who will be marginalised by these proposals.

On one level, these are small interventions, but when our community pauses to reflect on Hanley Park’s fluctuating fortunes, taken together they are truly vital to sustaining the confidence that families feel in the council’s ability to manage this challenging but loved space.

Such progress and positivity in our city can be reversed in the blink of an eye. A significant minority of visitors do still report concerns about safety, and these figures could easily rise. Negative and often misleading media stories threaten to return the park to its past days of stigma and dereliction. Burslem Park was the first in the city to be restored, in 2012. But Burslem lost an energetic PLO a few years ago, followed by its Friends Of group, and a walk in the park gives the impression of a slide into unresolved vandalism, as community relationships have fallen away.

Our own group lost three of our founders during the pandemic, and reformed in 2023. We are mostly either working people, or full-time volunteers with multiple causes. Having invested time in listening to our community last year, we are excited to be collaborating with the parks team to bring in fresh funding and deliver a series of bandstand events in 2024. We value the work the PLOs do with communities to engage families, children, volunteers, and new groups like our Living Streets Walking Group, which reaches refugees and older people.

PLOs tirelessly reassure our community and welcome underserved people back to previously stigmatised spaces. We know them to be incredibly skilled, supportive and proactive. Theirs is a soft approach, but they address issues that are hard to solve.

Our concern is not only for the park, but for Stoke-on-Trent. The current neighbouring scheme to improve College Road is supported by the Transforming Cities programme, but any investment in transformation can only be skin-deep if progress made in our city’s most prominent green space is so quickly discarded. We are unsure how Hanley Park anticipates retaining its Green Flag Award – a condition of its lottery funding – if the community engagement required by the scheme is so undervalued as to be framed in this year’s Budget proposals as a ‘saving not requiring consultation.’

This may be technically true, but it is also tone-deaf.

Our preference and constitutional purpose are to support the council in the interests of the park. We do not take sides, other than to support the huge value of what the Local Authority has achieved here. But it would be wrong of us to be silent. These reductions are not in the interests of the park, the wider community, or our city, and it is our responsibility to be clear about what stands to be lost.

Yours in respect and love for our city,,

Lynne Ball

Campaign Lead, on behalf of Friends of Hanley Park