DOZENS of outsourced gardeners working for the Royal Parks began a second round of strikes this morning over pay. The gardeners, who look after London’s most prestigious parks, including Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, and St James’s Park, voted 95 per cent in favour of strike action last month after their employer, Idverde, offered a…
Page A2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 28 September 2026
Royal Parks gardeners vote 95 per cent to strike over 70p an hour, offered 70p an hour again
As it ran on the front
Seventy pence an hour. Seventy — that is the figure Idverde put in front of the people who tend Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens and St James's Park, and you are hunting for the clause it breaks. There is none. Ninety-five per cent of them voted to strike on that offer last month; they walked out on the first, second and third of September; and this morning they walked out a second time, the firm having failed to deliver an improved offer. Nothing broke. That is the contract working.
A margin is not a fund, mind you. It is what remains once the wage bill is met, which makes the wage bill the one place a margin can be widened. One hundred and twenty-nine billion pounds of public money passed through outsourcing firms last year — close to eleven pence of every pound the state spends, eleven — and an estimated six billion came out the other end as profit. A tidy rentier's take.…
…(cont) And what does seventy pence an hour purchase? ... Two rounds of strikes in the most prestigious parks in London. Their organiser Anna Lee says the gardeners are "skilled, experienced professionals and they know what their labour is worth". The offer is unchanged. The gardeners are out.
Two seasons the hedger mends the fence. Two seasons, the same thin loaf.
“Somebody mows Hyde Park for a living and the raise on the table is seventy pence an hour — that is not a shortfall, that is what is left after the profit is taken out first. Six billion quid comes out of public services as profit and the guy with the strimmer is told the money ran out before it got to him. They tell you there is no money for wages. There is money. It is just parked one line above the wages.”
“Look, the contract was competitively tendered, the offer is a pay increase — it is more than they earned last year, which is the definition of a rise. Did I say the margin comes out of wages? That does not sound like me. And frankly, if the public wanted the parks staffed by public employees, the public should not have handed the parks to a contractor; we are just the firm that answered the advert.”
Earlier in this story
- Outsourcing firms clear £6bn from Britain's public services, which is what the contracts say they may do By Sterling · the milkman edition, 28 September 2026
The receipts
· Gardeners working in some of London’s most prestigious parks are to strike in a dispute over pay from the morgue, 27 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.