The smoking gun: seeking a landowner statement

You may have picked up that there have been a number of issues about Freedom of Information requests relating to Stoke Lodge – most recently, requests relating to discussions about a ‘landowner statement’. What does that have to do with the TVG applications?

A landowner statement is a mechanism under the Commons Act 2006 that allows landowners to protect land from registration as a town or village green and from claims for additional rights of way. The landowner makes an application to deposit a statement and a map of the land, and there is a process requiring public notices to be displayed to let people know about the statement and object if appropriate. The sole purpose of a landowner statement is to ‘bring to an end any period of recreational use ‘as of right’ over land’. 

If the statement is deposited before there has been 20 years’ recreational use of the land ‘as of right’, it prevents users obtaining the 20 years they need to apply for TVG registration. But if recreational use has already taken place over the land for 20 years or more, then the deposit of a statement triggers a one year grace period in which an application may be made – and the public notice process is likely to make people aware of the need to take action.

No landowner statement has been made in relation to Stoke Lodge Playing Fields – that’s not the issue. But we know that Cotham School was asking Bristol City Council to make one before these TVG applications went in. Now, if you think that ‘as of right’ use doesn’t exist, or has already been ended more than a year ago, then you don’t need one of these (and equally there’s no particular risk in making one – it’s just not relevant). We know from the notes of a meeting between Council officers and the School dated 21 September 2018 (after the TVG2 application had been lodged) that there had been discussions between the school and the Council about making a statement. The notes (apparently made by/on behalf of Gary Collins, Head of Development Management) record ‘Landowner statement – where is this? Is this still relevant’.

So Cotham School thought a landowner statement was necessary – and one reason why the Council might have been cautious about making one would have been the prospect that it would trigger another TVG application because 20 years’ of ‘as of right’ use was already in the bag.  And that means that neither Cotham School nor the Council thought that the Avon signs had been effective to prohibit informal use (at least during this application period, from 1998 onwards). So it’s very relevant for these applications to find out what was happening in those discussions.

Here comes the really shady bit. The Council initially refused to disclose anything relating to those discussions and claimed that any FOI request relating to Stoke Lodge Playing Fields was automatically vexatious and could be refused.  Just to be sure, they refused other requests that were nothing to do with Stoke Lodge as well (something that Private Eye picked up on last summer).

On 22 August 2022 the Information Commissioner ruled that the Council’s ‘blanket approach’ to requests relating to Stoke Lodge is not a proper use of the relevant Freedom of Information Act exemption. However, it turned out that even after that decision, the Council refused a separate third party request about landowner statements on the same basis, despite the ICO’s ruling. So then we asked a question at Full Council about officers not complying with the ICO’s decision, and you can see what happened here. 

The Mayor implied in his response that the Council would comply with the ICO’s decision in relation to fresh requests, so we made another request for the same information. You can see how that’s going here. 

Essentially, the Council is saying that it no longer thinks that asking for this information is vexatious, but that there are multiple other reasons for refusing it – they just hadn’t thought of them before. The Council is refusing to disclose information that is clearly relevant to the TVG applications. Why would it do that?

The underlying point is this: there would be no need to consider making such a statement, and Cotham School and the Council would not have been discussing it, if they considered that ‘as of right’ use didn’t exist. So even if BCC carries on refusing to disclose anything about this, the fact that those discussions happened gives the game away – they know we’re right about ‘as of right’ use, they just don’t want to admit it.