The end of the playground

In which one playground shuts and another is sealed off from the public before it even opens, in a chilling warning for the future of local government.

Actual scenes of a playground in Bedfordshire

This is a tale of two playgrounds. One is closing soon while the other - brand new - has stood empty for nearly a year, ringed with steel fencing to stop people from using it. Their stories aren’t the most important thing you’ll read today, but they illustrate something much bigger - the collapse and retreat of local government, and the profound effect it will have on our public spaces.

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The first playground

Bedfordshire is a strange land full of curiosities, where fields, rolling hills and quaint villages are punctuated by colossal airship hangars, cold war spy bases and vintage aircraft collections. The sort of place that would make an excellent setting for an Avengers revival (the English one¹, not the bodybuilders in spandex). Among all this, nestled in ancient woodland miles from the nearest town of any note, lies our first playground. It sits in the grounds of a historic aircraft collection maintained by a registered charity - the Shuttleworth Trust.

Despite its remote location, the playground has a lot going for it. It’s spacious and well-equipped, covering nearly an acre. It’s surrounded by woodlands and gardens, and (unlike the collection itself) free to enter. It’s not covered in dog shit or graffiti. Families can (and do) spend hours there, making use of the café attached to the neighbouring museum for loos and refreshments. It’s been a popular spot for over a decade now, but sadly it’s about to close for good.

The Trust made the announcement on Facebook, citing costs. The equipment in the playground is reaching the end of its lifespan, and they say they cannot fund the cost of replacing it to current standards, which would be bloody expensive. As you can imagine, this went down like a bucket of cold sick with locals, who were deeply upset to lose such a useful spot.

Their responses were robust, but surprisingly constructive for a small town Facebook group that delights in telling its local MP² to ‘fuck off and stop freezing pensioners.’ Well-meaning people offered sensible ideas to try to save the playground, but unfortunately they were all bad. They’re worth exploring a little because they say a lot about the disconnect between how people think things like playgrounds are paid for, and cold hard economic reality. Their suggestions fell into three main categories:

“With what they charge, they have the money to do this!”

People - not you, other people - tend to assume that high ticket prices mean someone is raking it in. Twenty or thirty quid seems a lot of money to visit a museum or a stately home, especially if you’re a family of four, but these places cost an absolute fortune to keep going. Events at Shuttleworth can cost over forty pounds³, but maintaining 100-year-old aircraft in airworthy condition is phenomenally expensive. So yes, they charge a lot, but a quick look at their accounts shows that their total revenue is still barely a third of what’s required to keep the lights on - the rest comes from long-term investments which effectively subsidise the price of admission. Those investments seem large - tens of millions of pounds - but they need to sustain the collection for… well, forever.

Spitfires cost around £800k per unit (adjusted for inflation) when built, but sell for closer to £2m today. If you’re thinking of buying one, routine maintenance and insurance would set you back around £100k, and the Merlin engine requires a £120k overhaul every few hundred hours of flying. You also need somewhere to put it.

“Surely people using your free playground make you money!”

Shuttleworth has a café, and a lot of families using the playground will go and spend money in it, so surely that generates a lucrative revenue stream from all those cakes, coffees, and sausage rolls? Sadly, making profit from a café or restaurant is notoriously hard - there are huge equipment costs, crippling depreciation, and armies of surly teenagers to pay⁴. It’s an industry where owners get so desperate they invite Gordon Ramsay to scream at them until they make money out of pure fear⁵. Very few charities or venues with a small café are making significant profit from it - in fact a lot of them will make a loss, and only really exist to make the overall proposition more attractive to visitors. A few extra customers certainly won’t pay for a playground.

“Can’t you get money from a grant/the lottery/a crowd-funder?”

Which sort of makes sense, except that the collection is run by a charity, where trustees have a legal duty to make sure that fundraising is in service of the charitable object - the core purpose of the charity. The object in this case is maintaining a historic aircraft collection, not providing a community playground. If a charity in financial stress (Shuttleworth was hit hard by COVID) is diverting staff time to a fundraising campaign for a sideline that isn’t actually part of its core purpose, that could (fairly) be seen as a failure of governance for which trustees could be held responsible. Similarly, grant-awarding bodies would question why you were sinking their money into something that had no real impact on your core purpose. And frankly the amounts required would be well outside the range of a non-viral local crowd-funder.

Many of the same problems would apply to any charity, and that’s really the main point here: charities don’t exist to run random bits of local infrastructure or services as a sideline. It’s lovely when they do, but you shouldn’t be hugely surprised if they can’t fund it long-term. So who can? Luckily other organisations are stepping into the fold, which brings me to…

The second playground

Several miles from Shuttleworth lies the second playground, a smaller but well-equipped facility perched on the corner of a new housing development in a rural village. The development was highly controversial because it involved building something in Southern England that people could live in⁶, so the developers placated the local NIMBYs by quite literally giving them something to swivel on.

Easily reached by footpath from the village hall, with stunning views across the rolling hills and farmland of Bedfordshire, it’s the perfect place for families with small children to spend some time.

However, no child has ever set foot in it.

Since it was constructed last spring, it has been completely surrounded by six-foot steel fencing, with signs warning people to keep out. A pristine playground full of expensive equipment has sat unused in the sun, rain, frost and snow, slowly accumulating dust and rust and the detritus of the passing seasons.

The immediate cause is that the local parish council are refusing to accept handover of the site from the developers. Various reasons have been given⁷, ranging from the gradient of a nearby path to the tree planting layout, but the main obstacle seems to be that the equipment installed is different from that approved in the planning stage, and therefore needs to be replaced. It’s not particularly clear what the difference is, but there’s no suggestion that the current equipment is dangerous, just that it might not be as accessible as it could be. The two sides have remained at an impasse, and so the playground sits empty.

In a simpler time, some kind of compromise might have been reached. Maybe the playground could have opened last summer and then closed during the winter for modifications to be made. But this kind of practical compromise is impossible when every interaction between council and developer is legally moderated to the nth degree. The developers have likely been a bit naughty and the parish council are doing the right thing in challenging them, but the wider system or legal framework they operate under means that they can’t do this and accept some form of handover at the same time. So here we are, with an empty playground and hundreds of frustrated parents.

At some point the playground will open, but the problems won’t stop there: ten or fifteen years from now the equipment will require updating, and the developer will have long since moved on. Who, then, pays for the equipment to be replaced? Certainly the parish council can’t afford such an outlay, so the odds are that the site will eventually fall into disrepair and close for lack of funding, just like the first playground.

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The problem is that we’re relying on random charities and scraps from developers to fund and maintain an important part of the public realm. So where is local government in all this? People are seeing their council tax rise year after year, consuming a large and growing chunk of their pay packet, yet what they receive for that money seems less and less: in this case, what they receive is a set of barricades closing off an apparently pristine playground, so it’s not really surprising that they’re bloody livid.

These examples aren’t anomalies - playgrounds across the country are falling apart and closing because local councils simply can’t afford to maintain them. Some are still being built, but budgets are being cut year after year with no end in sight. That has real consequences for children - you’re not an idiot so I don’t need to explain to you that playgrounds are important places for our children, vital for their development, and a haven for the thousands of kids (and their parents) who don’t have access to gardens to play in.

The preamble to Central Bedfordshire Council’s 2025-26 budget reads like a panic attack in written form. It’s not just bad, it’s completely unsustainable with no prospect of improvement. School transport costs have increased by over 100% - from £9m to £20m - in just 4 years. In a single year, residential care costs for children have increased by £2,000 per child… per week.⁸ Adult social care costs have risen a staggering 35% in the same period. The average cost per adult has increased 13% in that time, which is bad enough, but the number of older people seeking support has sky-rocketed, increasing “beyond any reasonable forecast based on previous trend data.” A key driver is that people who “previously would have paid for their care are now finding their finances depleted and seeking council support.”

“If we take all the increased costs into account, our costs are forecast to be £32m more than our income next year. Our services are largely funded by Council Tax, and we cannot increase Council Tax by more than 5 per cent. We have to make changes to services so we can continue to provide the services we are required to provide by law.” - Central Bedfordshire Council

These are costs the council are legally obliged to fund, despite council tax rises being capped to 5%, and they will only get worse, as a recent graph shared by Will Jennings⁹ illustrates. Central Bedfordshire is made up of villages and small towns, and the populations of these places are skewing disproportionately older compared to larger, more urban areas. As these areas continue to age, more and more elderly people will need to be supported by the same overall population. There is simply no way that local councils can absorb this kind of cost.

Faced with this financial tsunami, local government is simply giving up and withdrawing from large areas of responsibility, across everything from libraries to public spaces to staffing the local tip. We’re not just talking about cuts here, or temporary reductions - in some cases there is simply no prospect of these services or investments ever being restored.

That’s what these playgrounds represent - infrastructure that has been abandoned by government, leaving communities scrambling to figure out how to sustain it. They are the canaries in the coal mine, a sign of what’s to come as budgets are squeezed beyond breaking point, and a visible reminder of failure and decline.

This is, of course, a decision. By mandating which services have to be funded while simultaneously capping the taxes that pay for them, Westminster has decided to cut or halt funding to an array of other services and pretend that this is the choice of local councils, which of course it isn’t. Meanwhile, many voters are left feeling like they’re paying £250pm for a fortnightly bin collection and precious little else.

And that, ultimately, undermines the entire basis of local government and taxation. In what will become a regular theme of this blog: nobody voted for this, nobody seems to own the decision, and there is a fundamental misalignment of values between what people have been told to expect for their money, and what government is providing. If residents are pouring a growing portion their pay into a black hole and seeing only decay and decline and shittier services in return, how on Earth can you expect them to be happy with that? How do you justify it to voters? And where is the plan to change it?

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1. A new Avengers series would be an absolute nailed-on hit and I can’t understand why, in this age of constantly rebooting old franchises, there isn’t one. Someone start a change.org petition or something.

2. Joking aside, I don’t know why anyone would be an MP when Facebook exists, the amount of constant abuse is astonishing.

3. Or about thrice that if you visit the burger van.

4. It’s far beyond the scope of this post, but the post-Brexit/COVID replacement of competent adult Europeans with less competent British teenagers across vast swathes of the hospitality industry is another good example of national decline.

5. One of the sillier opinions which I genuinely hold is that you could scrap most MBA courses and just get students to watch every episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, a show which - effing and jeffing aside - will teach you basically every important lesson there is in running a business.

6. The only thing NIMBYs hate more than new buildings is new people.

7. I spent a lot of time going through minutes and asking questions to try to pin this down further but struggled to get a clear answer. While I could probably go further, part of my point here is that residents shouldn’t have to be journalists, and if I can’t can an answer from casual inquiry there’s a real failure of communication on the part of the Parish.

8. I’ve sort of glossed over it here, but I want to come back to these costs in a future post as some of these increases seem frankly bonkers.

9. He’s great, follow him: https://bsky.app/profile/drjennings.bsky.social