The new boss of Newcastle's parks has pledged to make an immediate start on returning the city's green spaces to their former glory.
The newly-created Newcastle Parks Trust will take control of 32 parks and more than 60 allotment sites from the cash-strapped city council on April 1.
James Cross, the charitable trust's chief executive, has promised to start tackling the parks' maintenance backlog right away and says the new organisation will not be limited to "firefighting" in the way that the council has been during years of brutal budget cuts.
Mr Cross, who served for four years as chief executive of Natural England, told Newcastle City Council's health scrutiny committee on Thursday: "We have not really done any proactive planning for a long time, it has been reactive and firefighting."
He added: "It is about having a clean, safe, beautiful environment. Those are the conversations we have had already and there are things we can do now to start to address that."
Newcastle is the first major metropolitan authority in the UK to hand over its parks and allotments to an independent charitable trust, after its parks budget was slashed by 91%. It is hoped that a charitable trust will be secure new funding from sources that would be off-limits to the local authority.
Mr Cross said: "We can access funding sources that the council cannot. I have already had conversations with government and funding bodies about putting in place the investment we need. Over the next three or four weeks we will have a works programme that will seek to address the backlog of maintenance issues."
He added: "I am not distracted by other aspects of the council, my senior leadership team will be 100% focused. That gives us a capability to look at funding opportunities and strategic opportunities that will deliver a tangible benefit to whoever uses the parks and allotments."
Lib Dem councillor Wendy Taylor, the committee's chair, said that most complaints about parks relate to fly-tipping, litter, a lack of bins, dog dirt, the the poor state of toilets.
Tony Durcan, the council's assistant director for transformation, said that the authority has "not invested for quite a long time" in its parks and that the trust already has a pot of money put aside to carry out all urgent repairs needed across the city once it takes control.
Coun Felicity Mendelson raised concerns about the number of commercial events being held in parks, citing the upcoming This is Tomorrow music festival at Exhibition Park as something that is "really good and makes money" but restricts people's enjoyment of the park for weeks either side of the event.
Mr Cross promised that commercial opportunities would always be "secondary" in the mind of the Parks Trust, adding: "Our purpose is around making parks a better and more vibrant place."
He also pledged to make sure that the trust is truly representative of Newcastle's communities, after it was criticised for having no black and minority ethnic board members.
