Village Allotments That ponderous but well-intentioned vehicle, The Town and
Country Planning Act, seems now to have got well into a second gear. When it hopes to be running' smoothly in top I -doubt .if even its sponsors would care to say. Some of its provisions have astonished countrymen. In addition to making provision for both public and private open spaces in the country, an excellent thing, it seeks to increase the space for village allotments. What bureaucrat conceived This Scheme I do not know, but it would have interested him to see, at a recent Rural Council meeting specially called to deal with it, almost every one of twenty members getting up to say that three-quarters of the allotments in his village were already derelict. In not a single case was there a shortage of allot, ments ; in every case the desire for allotments was dying or dead. In some cases as much as five acres were derelict ; in my own village there are allotments that have not been worked for the better part of ten years and will not be worked) apparently, for another ten. Yet, according to the Act, more allotment land must be reserved by parish councils and, if necessary, purchased by them. Since land is literally not wanted and since a penny rate, in many villages, produces under ten pounds, what the average parish councillor thinks of the ministerial workings is, not for the first time, unprintable here.
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