Fact-checking: how much space does Cotham need, and what for?

We mentioned in the previous post the witness statement submitted to the TVG1 public inquiry by Cotham School’s Headteacher Jo Butler, in which she made various statements to support Cotham’s case for why Stoke Lodge shouldn’t be registered as a Village Green. In today’s fact-checking post we’re going to look at that in more detail.

First, Ms Butler claimed that Ofsted required detached playing fields to be fenced, and we’ve already dealt with that – Ofsted has confirmed that’s not true. Next, she said that the school’s space requirements were such that they need the whole of Stoke Lodge – in fact she says they need the arboretum too even though it’s outside their lease (greedy!):

There are a few problems with these calculations. First, the ‘space requirement’ is a guideline, not a requirement as Ms Butler claimed. Secondly, the pupil admission number for Cotham School is 1215 at ages 11-16, not 1480. We assume Ms Butler is adding in the pupils in the Post-16 Centre there. And based on satellite mapping, both the school’s on-site space (including the multi-use games area and artificial pitch) and the size of the leased area at Stoke Lodge is greater than the school has estimated. When you tally all that up, the extra offsite space indicated by the guidelines is about half of the leased area at Stoke Lodge – which isn’t a surprise, because the school typically only uses the top end anyway.

Next, Ms Butler says that ‘because Stoke Lodge is not fenced’, Cotham is having to pay £25k per year to hire facilities at Coombe Dingle Sports Complex.

This is clearly untrue, because we know that Cotham had been hiring facilities at CDSC since before 2000 (it stopped using its former playing fields on Kellaway Avenue in the late 1990s because it thought they weren’t of a high enough standard – those are now the playing fields of Redland Green School). And we have the data on hire costs paid by Cotham to CDSC from September 2011 onwards, and they increase year on year by inflation – there is no massive uptick in April 2014 after the school did its ‘risk assessment’. The truth is that Cotham already had its hiring arrangements in place before it abandoned use of Stoke Lodge, and carried them on in exactly the same way it always had done. What changed was that it didn’t want to pay to hire CDSC any more, which is fair enough but is not a reason why the public should lose the use of important open space. And by the way, CDSC didn’t have a perimeter fence all the way round at the time either, and there is public access to and through the site. So there’s that.

But towards the end of Ms Butler’s statement, we see a hint of something else coming through – the reason why Cotham really doesn’t want Stoke Lodge to be registered as a TVG. It’s not to do with public access (although the school is clearly very antagonistic towards the local community). No, it’s this:

If Stoke Lodge is registered as a Village Green, it will be difficult for Cotham to develop and commercialise it. Cotham doesn’t want grass pitches on important open space and rolling parkland, it wants artificial pitches (which would have yet more fencing and probably floodlights); it wants hardstanding for cars and coaches – it wants facilities to rent out, even though CDSC is better-equipped and only a couple of minutes’ walk away.

This is why the TVG is necessary – without it, this historic parkland estate will be lost under concrete and tarmac.