26 February 2022
Your requests
- can you provide information to me under the Freedom of Information (FOI) request concerning the money incoming from (and profit made by) the council from the events held on Clapham Common for the past 3 years please, including the bank holiday weekend festival being held onsite at present as well as the funfairs, etc. held regularly on the westside gravel site?
- can you also detail the ways these moneys are budgeted for re-investment or other uses please?
Our response
- 2019-2020 – £381,157.75
- 2020-2021 – £16,849.16
- 2021–2022 (forecast) - £409,196.04
Event service costs:
- 2019-20 = £632,000 (actuals)
- 2020-21 = £624,000 (actuals)
- 2021-22 = £624,000 (forecast based on last year’s actuals)
- income from events is used to fund core council services such as parks and Children’s Services. Once the events income target is met, surplus income is used for a wide range of benefits, such as funding free community bandstand programmes on Clapham Common, and in Ruskin and Myatt’s Fields Park. Following recommendations from a recent Scrutiny Commission, it is also planned to use some of this surplus income to fund accessibility improvements across several parks and open spaces.
A fixed percentage of the income from every event is transferred to the Parks team as Parks Investment Levy. This is not counted as part of the Parks budget, so can be spent on any enhancements, and is fully ring-fenced to this purpose. Most of this money (80%) is spent in the park where the income was generated, on projects agreed with the main stakeholder group. The remainder is spent on improvements in smaller parks which don’t benefit from events income.
Following the major cut to the parks budget in 2016, income from events is invaluable in funding a wide range of improvements within our parks and open spaces.