Stoke Council now encouraging self-management of allotments

There has been what appears to be a significant change in allotments policy at Stoke-on-Trent City Council. The Council are now going to be actively encouraging self-management of sites, with the aim that...

"over the next five years 75 per cent of sites will have accepted a degree of shared management."

Why are they doing this? Presumably to reduce the number of hours that staff have to spend managing allotments, when autonomous committees could do a better job. But note also that user-managed sites are not counted when compiling the city's official allotments waiting-list figures. So the waiting-list will probably appear to go down. I wonder if this effect may: 1) benefit the Council politically in the elections of 2015; and 2) lessen public demands for establishing new allotments in the city, meaning the Council has more spare land to sell off to developers?