Greenwich Council’s cabinet voted to axe three of the borough’s five staffed adventure play centres – but the decision has been challenged by opposition councillors and will now go to a scrutiny hearing.
A staffed play centre in Woolwich is to be closed altogether and replaced with an unstaffed playground nearby, while one on the Coldharbour Estate in Mottingham is to become a “community hub” for all residents and may have some youth provision.
The Labour council said it was looking at offers from three organisations that wanted to take over the third centre, on the Glyndon Estate in Plumstead.
Plumstead Adventure Playcentre will stay open, while a centre on the Meridian Estate in west Greenwich will become a staffed “youth hub”.
The Conservative group leader on the council, Matt Hartley, sent a notice to call in the decision for further scrutiny within minutes of the meeting ending on Wednesday.
A panel of councillors will now look again at the issue at a later date, and could send the decision back to the cabinet.
Greenwich had hoped to save £600,000 a year as part of the programme, but the decision to keep Plumstead has cut the saving to a maximum of £415,000. It said only 1.4 per cent of children in the borough used the centres.
The decision to close the staffed centres came after a consultation which included concerns from the Metropolitan Police’s neighbourhood superintendent for Greenwich, but the council has not published the full consultation responses.
Hartley – who represents the Coldharbour Estate as a councillor – wants the council to “go back to the drawing board” and to “re-run a genuine consultation” as well as drawing on the views of charities such as London Play and Play England, which had opposed the cuts.
Sandra Bauer, the cabinet member for equality, culture and communities, said that the adventure play centres had been around for up to 50 years and had “suffered from cuts like every other service”.
“Use of some centres is low, especially for girls and young women, our aspiration at the start was about transforming adventure pay to extend access both in access available and those with mobility issues too,” she said.
Bauer said the aim was to ensure “children across Greenwich continued to have safe places that promote physical health, allow them to interact with other children and young adults, and build confidence and independence”.
“The narrative that some have been touting is that this is about closure and an end to services for young people – it’s not and never has been about closure,” Bauer said. “It’s about play being available to all and for more than 30 hours a week.”
She added that most of the 668 people who responded to the survey did not have children at the centres, but all views were valued and were taken into account.
“Staff provision is valued by the parents who responded to the survey, and I don’t underestimate the importance of it. That’s why, at three out of five centres, we’ll still have it.
“Where researchers engage young people in schools, they expressed a preference for more accessible outdoor provision over a staffed offer.”
Bauer said that while the council was looking at replacing the staffed centre in Woolwich with an unstaffed outdoor playground at the Clockhouse Community Centre, it was considering expanding provision there in the years to come.
Lara Ruffle Coles, from the Save Greenwich Adventure Playcentres group, told the meeting that the play centres “cannot be replaced with unstaffed outdoor facilities that do not work in the cold and wet”.
“You talk of the 70,000 children in our borough, you give a statistic of 1.4 per cent, you say this isn’t good enough usage,” she said. “But that’s 980 young, vulnerable people with somewhere safe to go.”
David Monteith, a resident who has worked in centres elsewhere in London, said: The consultation only considered a limited and insular range of metrics. Significant research and practical evidence from around the country shows the detrimental effect of curtailing supervised adventure play, and this research and evidence has not been taken into account.
“My own daughter was involved in a misunderstanding that led to a threat of physical violence from another child’s older sibling. My daughter was saved from a beating by the intervention of paid, professional staff. This is the value of staffed Adventure Play Centres. We are playing with the safety of the borough’s children, and under scrutiny the message from the council is that their safety is not valuable.”
London Play’s director Fiona Sutherland attended the cabinet meeting, but her request to address the meeting was declined.
Sutherland had been due to tell the cabinet that “this proposal represents a significant downgrade of provision for some of Greenwich’s most vulnerable children”. She told The Greenwich Wire that the group still hoped to talk about the issue with the council.
Lakshan Saldin, the Green councillor for Charlton Hornfair, compared the cuts with the council’s promotion of a film called Red, which was made in Woolwich and depicts a young woman’s spiral into a life of violence. He called on the council to publish the Met’s response to the consultation.
“The whole purpose [of the film] was predicated on an intervention by trusted adults that were providing supervised play,” he said. “This is what we are at risk of losing.”
Saldin also raised the fact that neighbouring Lewisham Council had recently invested £500,000 in its youth services. Bauer said at a full council meeting later that Greenwich did not qualify for the government’s Better Youth Spaces programme and that cash was not going towards the running of the services.
Hartley said the council had not followed its own consultation guidelines and added: “People on the Coldharbour estate that I represent as a councillor feel a real sense of betrayal. They have engaged in good faith in this process, and they have been ignored.”
Both Hartley and Saldin said that the council should talk to the charity Play England, which had pledged to help find funding.
But the cabinet voted to go ahead with the cuts. Rachel Taggart-Ryan, the cabinet member for community safety, said: “I was born and grew up and spent nearly my entire life in Greenwich, and I had an active interest in outdoor play and trained as a climbing instructor at the climbing wall in Woolwich Dockyard and until I became a councillor, I had never heard of the adventure playcentres.
“So whether they reflect the youth offer – I’m not sure it was something that was really reflecting of what youth was in the 1990s and early 2000, and it’s not something I’ve noticed many parents of my age bringing their primary school-aged children to.”
Bauer said the saving was “incredibly hard” and had been brought to the council several times times but had been “kicked away because we’d thing to replace it with”.
“We’ve got to the place now that we’ve run out of savings to make, but we can build back something in the youth service.”
The cabinet also decided that its broader youth service, Young Greenwich, would be relaunched as NextGen Greenwich, with the old Meridian playcentre forming one of the hubs alongside existing hubs in Woolwich, Thamesmead and the Avery Hill estate. The future of the existing youth hub at The Valley is being discussed with Charlton Athletic, a council spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added: “The council met Play England this week for a productive meeting where they acknowledged the challenges faced by local councils. We have reiterated our commitment to working with them moving forward as we value the insight and expertise that they provide.
“As we have engaged with London Play, it was agreed to allow four other local representatives to address cabinet.”
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