Challenges laid bare as Kirklees play area costs skyrocket
The cost of some play equipment in Kirklees has more than doubled in the past five years, councillors have heard.
Kirklees Council is revisiting its approach to investing in play areas amid a series of challenges.
At a recent meeting of the environment and climate change scrutiny panel, members heard an update on the local authority’s Playable Spaces Strategy.
The strategy came into force back in 2020 and is concerned with investment into the borough’s play areas aiming to improve the overall quality of play across Kirklees.
Kirklees has a total of 314 play areas – which is just less than the total combined across Leeds and Bradford – with 252 included in the programme based on equipment having an average lifespan of 15 years.
To date, a total of £3.9m has been invested into such spaces, and a further £5.6m allocated to sites or in contract.
The council is in the process of reshaping its strategy and wanted feedback from the panel before returning to cabinet in summer.
As well as using capital funding, the strategy makes use of Section 106 funds secured from housing developers and other streams of external cash.
Head of Operational Services, Will Acornley, said this had allowed the local authority to do “a lot more” than originally planned, though challenges remain.
Among these is the skyrocketing cost of play equipment, with the price of some items more than doubling in the past five years.
“As we started out on this journey, as you’ll see, we could afford a lot more and to do a lot more on some of the earlier spaces than we can now but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t still be doing what we set out to do,” he said.
"And we have since then had some restrictions on our resources internally as well in terms of the size of the team that’s delivering this – it’s smaller than when we originally set out.”
Councillor Matthew McLoughlin (Labour, Colne Valley) said: “I think the simplest bit of feedback I can give you is that it’s too slow. It’s frustratingly slow.
"Six years into this project and in my ward we’ve completed two parks. We were supposed to have a third on the way but we’ve had a snafu.”