Parks as a Statutory Service

I have just walked through King Edward VII park (Willesden), which was full of the stuff that you would expect on a sunny Sunday morning _ people playing football, dog walkers, joggers.  Some people think parks would be secured if they were made into a statutory service, like public libraries.  They feel this would safeguard parks against cuts in funding. 

In fact, as with libraries, I doubt that this would be the case.  So long as local authorities are seeing the kinds of cuts to total budgets that Labour areas are seeing, ways will have to be found to balance the budget.  Increasingly, making things more efficient is getting harder.  The only real way to safeguard such valued services is to increase the funding available to them.