The 12-year journey towards a TVG

Bristol City Council’s TVG webpage tells you that the process from applying to register land as a Town or Village Green to the final decision will take ‘up to a year’.

The first TVG application for Stoke Lodge Playing Fields was made by David Mayer on behalf of Save Stoke Lodge Parkland in March 2011. Here we are, more than 12 years later, with a date in the diary for the Public Rights of Way and Greens (PROWG) Committee to consider the current TVG applications on 28 June 2023. 12 years rather than 12 months – what on earth happened?!

At first the TVG1 process ran fairly smoothly – the Commons Registration Authority (the bit of BCC that looks after TVG applications) appointed an Inspector to consider the application – this happens where the Council is also the landowner, to avoid a conflict of interest. The Inspector recommended in 2013 that the land should be registered because all the legal tests were met and it was a ‘classic case of acquiescence’ by the Council as landowner – in the period from 1991 to 2011 Avon County Council and then BCC had known about large-scale informal use of the playing fields and had never objected to it.

But then the Council raised the issue of the old Avon County Council signs on the site, and the Inspector decided that a public inquiry was required after all. That was held in the summer of 2016, and later that year the Inspector recommended that, because of a recent case called Winterburn v Bennett, the land should not be registered after all. He considered that this case had changed the law so that if informal use continued despite clear and sufficient signs put up by a landowner objecting to that use, it could not be ‘as of right’. There’s more about this case here.

But the PROWG Committee disagreed in December 2016, and said that Avon County Council didn’t put up enough signs to make clear to everyone that it objected to informal use – and that Avon had sent mixed messages through its conduct, so it hadn’t communicated a clear objection. The PROWG Committee decided to register the land.

Cotham School objected to this and took the Council to court by way of judicial review. Bristol City Council defended the Committee’s decision, arguing that two signs were not enough on a site of this size. The High Court said that the Committee’s decision that Stoke Lodge is very different to the Winterburn car park was ‘not controversial’ – but because the Committee had accepted the Inspector’s report, it couldn’t then reach a different conclusion without showing its reasoning (which the published minutes failed to do). The school lost on 3 out of the 5 arguments it made, but the court agreed with the other two: that the minutes didn’t show the PROWG Committee’s decision-making process and didn’t give adequate reasons for departing from the Inspector’s recommendation. Because of that, the Committee’s decision was quashed.

But the precise conclusion reached by the Inspector was that the Avon County Council signs had made use not ‘as of right’ up to April 1996 (when Avon was abolished) – after that, Bristol City Council was the landowner, and so an idea was born… since the use of the land by the community had continued unchanged and unchallenged right up to summer 2018, why not make a new application for registration, one that started in 1998 and would be entirely within Bristol City Council’s period as landowner?

And so the story continued…