Stop the 20% wage cuts threatened by Islington Play Association
Caledonian councillors have backed the campaign opposing wages cuts for staff in 5 adventure playgrounds – two of which are in our ward. The staff have been told by Islington Play Association (IPA) they must take a 20 percent pay cut or lose their jobs.
IPA says it has budget shortfall of around £170,000 although their charity’s last annual accounts showed it had a cash reserve of £300,000. IPA is an independent charity and it is the employer of the adventure playground staff, not the Council. But it runs the playgrounds on behalf of Islington Council which overall provides almost £1 million a year in grants to IPA. Islington’s funding for the IPA adventure playgrounds increases with inflation annually. This year, it rose by 7.6%.
Play workers, parents and other residents have launched a petition. In just 4 days the petition garnered over 600 signatures. The campaigners say they aren’t simply protesting against wage cuts. The play service itself is at risk of collapse. They say the playgrounds offer “a safe place for our kids; they provide a platform for building social skills, physical development, and emotional growth.”
Islington funds 11 adventure playgrounds across the Borough. IPA runs five of them and another group “Awesome CIC” runs the other six. Awesome is a non-profit, community interest company which is also funded by the Council. Awesome gets less funding per playground than IPA but has not reported any financial difficulties. The IPA playgrounds are Crumbles Castle and Lumpy Hill in Caledonian ward, Toffee Park in Bunhill ward, Martin Luther King in Laycock ward and Timbuktu playground in Hillrise ward. IPA also has funding to run one of the Council’s children’s centre at Paradise Park.
Caledonian ward Councillors are highly critical of IPA’s conduct. Cllr Sara Hyde says: “Fire and re-hire is the worst kind of employment practice and one that we utterly condemn. Whenever a voluntary group faces financial difficulty it should not adopt such aggressive tactics. Far better to be fully transparent with its employees and negotiate a solution in good faith. And fire and rehire isn’t just a bad management practice, it’s a very risky type of brinkmanship. What if staff decline new contracts? The IPA adventure playground service is put at risk of closure.”
Cllr Una O’Halloran adds: “Over many years, Islington has trusted IPA to run some of our adventure playgrounds and a children’s centre. But there has been turnover amongst the management and trustee board. They should have come to the Council months ago when they spotted problems emerging. Money is tight for everyone including the Council and a simple bail-out may not completely fix the problem. Until the workers went public earlier this month about the trustees’ adversarial approach, the Council was not even aware of any financial difficulties.”
Cllr Paul Convery says: “Our adventure playgrounds are more than just great places for young people. They also symbolise the working class culture and history of this Borough. They grew out of slum clearance, family activism, volunteering and the eventual support from the GLC and Council. We cannot let them collapse.”
The Council’s Executive member for childrens’ services, Cllr Michelline Safi-Ngongo adds: “While IPA’s decision to reduce their staff salaries, to resolve their dire financial position, is very disappointing, I can recognise the very difficult economic conditions that all organisations are currently enduring. The cost-of-living crisis has affected not only the most vulnerable, but it has also affected charities. I know that IPA staff are dedicated to their jobs, and I hope that they will continue to provide an excellent service to our communities.”
Labour Councillors representing the Cally neighbourhood in Islington 
Thank you for supporting Islington playworkers. However, there are some points in this article which need clarifying.
Firstly, although the Council does contract Islington Play Association to deliver play services, it has consistently refused to remunerate that contract to the cost of delivery.
Playworkers at IPA were contracted to the NJC pay scale, a nationally collectively bargained scale which is based on the skills, responsibilities and experience needed to do the job. Not only that, it is the pay scale which is recognised by the local authority.
To expect organisations, and indeed to play them off against each other, to abandon this pay scale and embark on a race to the bottom in a false market – it is false because the authority is the only contractor – is a surrender to neo liberalism. It ignores the skills, responsibilities and experience in the playwork workforce and reduces us to competing with shelf stackers at Asda on minimum wage. The impact on quality and reliability of the service should not be ignored.
Secondly, although the last published accounts on the Charity Commission website do show a surplus, these accounts are for the financial year ended Mrch 2023. They do not reflect the current position. Neither does the article acknowledge the legal responsibility of the Trustees to retain reserves to cover the windup costs of the organisation in the event of collapse.
Charity funding is much more complex that the authors seem to realise. The post rightly says that the Play Association provides a childrens centre in Paradise Park, but the funding for the centre is restricted by law to the purpose of that childrens centre and no other. Are we expecting charity trustees to break the law?
We fully understand the difficulties that Islington Council are in, facing cuts from central government.
We are fully aware of the offence the previous government took against childrens play, cutting the Children’s Plan in the first two days of the Cameron administration. Indeed, Michael Gove gave personal instructions to civil servants to ignore all representations on the subject of play.
This is a national, not just an Islington problem.
But to lay the blame solely at the feet of an organisation which has tried to be a good employer by recognising the nationally negotiated pay scale is unfair and shifts blame onto charity workers and trustees where it should be laid at the door of central government and should be campaigned on that basis.
Kier Starmer was happy to visit and laud adventure playgrounds in Bristol after the Coulston riots. praising their grass roots community service and contribution to well being and community cohesion when he was touting for votes for the Bristol mayor.
Where is he now?
Thanks for your comment. Times are hard and money is indeed tight – as Cllr Michelline Ngongo observes. But the Council’s grant increases each year, the most recent being a 7.6% rise. There has not been any indication of a structural under-funding problem. For over 10 years, IPA has been operating 5 of Islington’s adventure playgrounds without any serious financial strain evident. This is why we ask what happened in the past year or so to lead the Trustees to conclude there is now a £170,000 gap between costs and grant income?
You are quite right that a charity should maintain a reserve. Over the past several years IPA had maintained a reserve of at least a quarter of a million in most years. The charity steadily increased the reserves from £233,698 in 2017-18 to £323,821 in 2022-23. Only about £19,500 of the 2023 balance sheet represented tangible assets and all the net reserves are unrestricted. In July 2024, the management announced a plan to cut wages by 20%. Unless it had significantly denuded its reserves in the 15 months from March 2023, it still had the option of using reserves to part-finance the funding gap whilst other less aggressive solutions might have been negotiated not least by bringing-in the Council to any discussion of the financial challenge IPA faced.
Finally, we do understand that IPA’s two main operational budgets are separate: the playgrounds and the children’s centre. We aren’t suggesting one can cross-subsidise the other. And we aren’t playing one provider (IPA) off against another (Awesome CIC). Both have comparable cost structures and grant income. It’s not unreasonable to suggest we benchmark one against the other. That is hardly “surrendering to neo-liberalism”.