The 2010 Cabinet Briefing Note – what came next? It could be you…

So what did the Council do after receiving the 2010 Cabinet Briefing note – the one that referred to ‘as of right’ use and to Stoke Lodge? The one that told the BCC Cabinet that Stoke Lodge Playing Field ‘is currently unfenced and allows unfettered community access’?

What happened next? Well, the Council didn’t put up any signs (nor did Cotham School until July 2018). It didn’t make a Direction (which was the only legal means for it to control use). 

Instead, the Council held a consultation on the development proposals for Stoke Lodge Playing Fields in summer 2010 and these were roundly rejected. On 13 September 2010, the Cabinet Member for Education, Clare Campion-Smith, formally wrote to officers in the education team stating:

‘As you know, the cabinet requested last year that officers should explore the shared use of school playing fields and avoid fencing them off to the public unless there were very strong reasons for doing so… The consultation has taken place and all who responded were in favour of shared use. The cabinet has agreed that no fencing should be erected’. 

On 15 September Clare Campion-Smith attended a meeting of the local Neighbourhood Partnership (which was the local area group with delegated authority through which the consultation had taken place) and confirmed her agreement to a resolution stating that ‘the Executive Member had given an assurance that the proposal to fence Stoke Lodge had categorically been dropped and that the parkland would remain with open access for all as of right.’

See those last three words? They aren’t there by accident, and because of the earlier Cabinet briefing and specific legal advice to the Council, their significance was clear.

Bristol City Council followed up in 2011 with an assurance in its public response to ‘Bristol’s Budget Conversation’. In answer to a comment referring to the Stoke Lodge proposals and saying that ‘I feel further fencing off of school playing fields is a waste of money’, the Council said:

‘We are happy to reassure people, once again, that we will not be fencing off the Stoke Lodge playing fields and quash this rumour once and for all’.

That ‘once and for all’ lasted until 2018 and a private meeting between Jo Butler (the Headteacher of Cotham School), Sandra Fryer (the Chair of Governors) and Mike Jackson, BCC’s freshly-in-post Head of Paid Service. This is the meeting at which the school complained about the very clear statement made by BCC officers in mid-July 2018 that the playing fields are the curtilage of a listed building (Stoke Lodge house) which meant that the school could not put up a fence without proper planning permission. On behalf of Cotham School, having to make a planning application was described as ‘pivotal and devastating’ – an odd statement given that the Chair of Governors is also a trustee of the Town and Country Planning Association, whose website states: ‘Planning matters to people. The way decisions are made influences people’s trust in local democracy and whether they feel at home in their communities.’  Quite.

The net result of that special pleading was a U-turn by the Council, which told Cotham on 21 September (a week after the TVG application was made) that it no longer considered the playing fields to be the curtilage of a listed building (quite a turn-around in just 2 months). The Council then, after giving Cotham that decision, got some hasty external legal advice ‘in order to confirm that we have a robust position in the event of the inevitable legal challenge brought by local residents’ – the words of Gary Collins, BCC’s Head of Development Management, in an email to Mike Jackson, Anna Keen and Asher Craig dated 24 September 2018. 

Even at this point, Gary Collins’ position was that the type and height of fencing used would have to be acceptable to the Council in order for the school to obtain landlord’s consent. It was only later that the Council was persuaded to retreat further and hide behind the idea that ‘the fence is not a structure’ (that’s right, the 1.6km long, 2m high fence that is concreted into the ground and has security cameras, retractable bollards and auto-locking gates is not a structure according to the Council). Why did officers make that move? Because the fence had to not be a structure in order for the Mayor to be able to say, as he did at Full Council in January 2019, that he had ‘no power over this‘ – as landlord and local planning authority BCC took no responsibility at all for the situation created by their U-turn on curtilage. Notice, by the way, the Mayor’s repeated statement in that last video clip that “It’s gone through the Monitoring Officer” – we’ll come back to that in a later post.

As we’ve said before, this is how it’s done. Incrementally. Behind the scenes. Despite all assurances previously given to the public.

And it could be your local green space next.