Didn’t Cotham say that community use just means club hire?

Yes, it did say that. But this isn’t a school that’s notorious for its honest and accurate communication of the facts in relation to Stoke Lodge (see also “Those aren’t covert CCTV cameras, they are overt but discreetly located” – we’ll come on to the whole spy camera issue at a later date).

Here’s the clause in the lease:

In a video published in January 2019, Sandra Fryer (the Chair of Governors, who has been on the school’s governing body for over 20 years and was involved with the academy conversion process), said the following:

“The playing fields are now leased to Cotham School on a 125 year lease. To be clear, the reference to community use in our lease does not confer the right to use our playing fields but rather that the school can manage and enable community use when not required by the school.”*

But it’s very easy to see that this statement is simply untrue. Both the main school lease and the separate Stoke Lodge lease include provisions that allow Cotham to enable community use through sessional lettings, that’s true – hiring out the sports hall or a pitch at Stoke Lodge is absolutely something the school can do. Both leases have a very similar provision on this, but it isn’t clause 2.1 – it’s in clause 3.12 on ‘Dealings’. And when Cotham does hire out its sports hall or a football pitch, the hirer’s use will be subject to the terms imposed by the school (such as how much to pay and when to leave).

But the lease for the school’s main site has no equivalent of the community use wording that the Council specifically inserted into clause 2.1 of the Stoke Lodge lease. There is no suggestion in Cotham’s main lease that the school’s use of its buildings on Cotham Lawn Road is subject to ‘all existing use by the community’. And yet the Stoke Lodge lease says exactly that – the property is demised [leased] to the Tenant [Cotham] subject to certain rights that are reserved to the Landlord [BCC] and ‘subject also to all existing rights and use of the Property including use by the community’. This means something very different from hiring out a football pitch.

Even taking that simply as a point of grammar, is community use subject to the school’s terms and conditions in the way that a hirer’s use of the school hall would be? Clearly not! It’s the other way around: the school’s use of Stoke Lodge is subject to ongoing community use of the same character as the use that existed in 2011 when the lease was granted. That’s what the lease says, and that aligns completely with the 2010 Cabinet Briefing Note and BCC’s subsequent decision that shared use should continue (see our earlier posts here and here). Trying to say that the community’s use is subject to the school’s permission makes no sense at all when you look at the lease.

This means that even without the TVG in place, Cotham School’s use of Stoke Lodge under the lease will always be subject to community use, every day of every year until September 2136. Does that give the people of Bristol an independently enforceable right under the lease? No, because the lease is between the Council and Cotham School – we are reliant on our Council making sure that its tenant keeps its side of the bargain (remember that Cotham is getting a more financially favourable deal under the terms of its lease compared to leases for other schools, in return for ongoing community use). Can we trust the Council to do keep the school in line? Apparently not – here is the rather curt response received when the matter was raised in 2019:

Throughout this saga, the Council has had multiple opportunities to do the right thing and defend shared use, and has actively sought to avoid (or even eliminate) those opportunities and to deny any responsibility for the situation. Just like at Packer’s Field (see our earlier post here), warm words of assurance, or even the terms the Council itself negotiates in a legal document, won’t help to protect public use of our open spaces if the Council decides it’s not interested, or if it has a different agenda.

*You can find the full length video of Sandra Fryer’s statement here. Original video created and published by Justice4Cotham for Cotham School. Extract produced for the purposes of criticism, review and quotation only.