We’ve now had time to work through the Council’s full Freedom of Information (FOI) response about the consultation behind the proposed redesign of Langthorne Park. We are grateful to the Council for the fullness of its response. Unfortunately, it confirms many of the concerns residents have been raising from the beginning.
To be clear: this is not an accusation that the Council acted in bad faith. Officers did carry out engagement, and with limited time and resources they did their best to speak to local people, and all the voices they did manage to capture are valid and important.
But the FOI shows the consultation process was not robust enough to justify the scale of permanent changes now being proposed for the park.
The Council has confirmed that:
- no assessment was made of whether respondents reflected the wider community or park user base
- no weighting or balancing methodology was applied
- no information was collected about whether respondents were regular park users
- formal survey responses, informal conversations, workshops and post-it notes from a family festival event were all treated as though they were the same
At the same time, much of the engagement was routed through family and youth-focused settings, including schools, youth groups, the Toy Library and family festival events. The demographic data shows that this approach meant families and young people were over-represented compared to the wider community.
It’s absolutely right that these groups were consulted. But if a consultation mainly reaches children, young people and families, it is likely to produce a very particular set of answers. That does not make those answers wrong. It just means they cannot automatically be treated as representative of everyone who uses and values the park.
Langthorne Park works precisely because it contains different kinds of spaces for different users: playgrounds and activity spaces for children and teenagers, but also mature planting, winding paths, formal gardens and peaceful enclosed areas for people looking for calm, nature and escape from the surrounding streets.
Those quieter spaces matter too.
The survey itself also raises serious questions. Many questions asked people whether they supported desirable outcomes like:
- making the park feel safer
- attracting wildlife
- encouraging people to spend time in nature
- decluttering the park
Most people will naturally say yes to those things - they are generic positive statements.
But asking people whether they want a park to feel safer, greener and more welcoming is not the same as asking whether they support removing mature planting, opening up enclosed spaces and changing the park’s character in order to achieve those aims.
Where the survey did refer to trade-offs, it often framed them in a way that made the proposed changes sound like obvious improvements. For example, one question asked whether residents supported “replacing tall, overgrown plants to open up views across the park and improve safety.”
That question does two things at once. It describes the existing planting as “overgrown,” a problem requiring correction. And it states that removing it will “improve safety,” which is far from certain.
A more neutral version might have asked: “Would you support removing mature planting in order to improve visibility?” That would likely have produced a very different response.
The same pattern appears in the phrase “declutter and make the park feel easier to use.” Decluttering sounds straightforwardly desirable - no one likes clutter. But the actual proposal involves removing decorative railings and walls, features many residents value. A more neutral version might have asked ‘Do you feel that the decorative railings and walls clutter the park, or are they a positive feature?’
Good consultation does not simply ask people whether they support desirable outcomes. It asks whether they accept the trade-offs involved in delivering them. If you ask whether I would like a bigger garden and I say yes, you cannot then claim I agreed to you knocking down my house to make the space for it.
And as the 290+ signatures on this petition suggest, when those trade-offs are presented clearly to residents, many are not willing to accept them. Interestingly, the number of people who have now supported this survey is greater than the number of people who responded to the Council’s 2024 consultation. It is also similar to the number of people who left google reviews for the park in the last 5 years - fewer than 1% of which mentioned any concerns about crime or anti-social behaviour.
We also believe the consultation treated safety too simply. Everyone wants Langthorne Park to feel safer. But many residents responding to the consultation called for practical measures such as better lighting, CCTV, visible management, wardens, community activity and policing where needed, rather than major physical redesign.
Removing some bushes does not address the underlying causes of drug dependency or anti-social behaviour, and many respondents effectively made this point themselves: what they wanted was better management, lighting and policing, not fewer plants.
The Council has now said it will carry out further consultation before the next phase of work is begun. We welcome that commitment.
But for that consultation to be meaningful, it cannot simply repeat the same methodology. It needs to be fundamentally improved so that it reaches a genuine cross-section of the community, including people who use the park in quieter, less visible ways.
It also needs to ask genuine trade-off questions. Residents should not only be asked whether they support positive outcomes like safety, nature and accessibility. They should also be asked whether they accept the specific losses involved in achieving them, including the removal of mature planting, quieter spaces, decorative railings, pergolas and the park’s existing sense of discovery.
Crucially, people who value the features at risk should be involved in framing those questions, so that the trade-offs are presented fairly rather than only through the language of “decluttering”, “opening up” or removing “overgrown” planting.
We all want Langthorne Park to be safer, greener and better maintained. But future consultation must properly ask what residents want to protect as well as what they want to change.