PUBLIC PLACES


We were able to buy some nice kit using that grant for sports and then putting the new contract together, we got a couple more tractors and a few other bits as well


” One of the many wildlife areas the team are responsible for they used in South London.”


A Ring-necked Parakeet, a common sight on Ealing Council land


Trying to get the


contractor interested in apprentice schemes for grounds maintenance when the bigger money is on the contract’s waste management side is hard


” 92 Signage at Perivale Park PC April/May 2021


“They’ve leased that space off us, and that has brought in all of the youth football to that location and, in doing so, they gave us a £100,000 grant to buy a tractor, slitter and verti-drain. That was all kit that we didn’t have, and that grant meant we didn’t need to buy that on the contract, so we were able to buy some nice kit using that grant for sports and then putting the new contract together, we got a couple more tractors and a few other bits as well.” “It's a combination of being able to cover the bigger areas but also the different types of grass cutting you can get out of one machine. So, rather than having cylinders that can only do cricket boundaries or your football pitches, we've got machines like the three wide-area Majors TD1600s that can take it down to a cricket boundary, or we can go and cut a meadow which is seventy centimetres plus high with that one bit of kit. Your driver can go out one day, and he can do three or four different types of cut just by adjusting the height - and get a good finish as well.”


“GEL has invested in some good new equipment, and that is part of enabling us to


take those skills back. Now, it’s about us giving people skills that have possibly been here for fifteen years but never had the experience of using the verti-drain, sand slitting or anything like that.” “The sad thing is we’ve lost the percentage of skilled workers. The number of unskilled workers on grounds maintenance now is around seventy percent, whereas before that would have only been thirty percent. I’ve recently lost two guys that ran sports, and one of them had done nearly fifty years service, so he knew the job inside out, and now I’m down to one person and myself who can mark out a running track, for example. Whereas, years ago, you’d look at a board and say I’ve got fifteen guys that can do that. Operationally, trying to figure out what is going to happen can be difficult because you are falling back to the same people. Unfortunately, the older guys within the group are still doing the major works because the younger ones haven’t yet got the skills.” “We saw it coming. About fifteen years


ago, you see it isn’t going in the right direction, and then suddenly, when it happens, you think you should have done


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