When We Love Stoke Lodge discovered, in 2021, that Cotham School’s Chair of Governors, Sandra Fryer, had used her contacts to ask for our TVG applications to be ‘kicked into the long grass’ a year earlier (see yesterday’s post), we naturally wanted to find out whether there had been other activity or favours requested along those lines that we should know about.
A Freedom of Information request to Bristol City Council to disclose any other correspondence between the CRA and Cotham School staff or governors was the first to receive a response from BCC that any request relating to Stoke Lodge was vexatious (which, by the way, isn’t a proper way to use the FoI exemptions).
Private Eye reported on this in September 2021, when the Council had become so used to saying that Stoke Lodge-related requests were vexatious, that it denied a request that was nothing at all to do with Stoke Lodge:
The Information Commissioner’s Office ruled against BCC in August 2022 (you can read the decision notice here), saying that it was wrong for the Council ‘to apply a blanket approach to requests received about Stoke Lodge Playing Fields… The issues raised are of public importance, both from the view of public access to formerly open public space, but also from a
point of protecting the land and landscape within and around the site.
There are also health and safety aspects relating to the use of the land.’
The Information Commissioner said that an issue like this ‘is likely to raise concerns which many parties may decide to make requests over. As such, the council is likely to receive a large number of requests from parties interested in its actions in the various different capacities in which it acts… The application to the Commons Registration Authority, and the council’s objection to this, are likely to generate correspondence, questions and requests. It raises issues of importance as regards open access to the land, which the school currently restricts. Other issues involve the protection of access to open space, the protection of the environment within, and surrounding the area concerned, as well as concerns that the council has acted appropriately in allowing the fencing to be erected, and in its oversight of the protection of the land under the school’s governance. The Commissioner recognises a high degree of value in these issues in regard to the protection of the environment in and around the site.’
The Commissioner was not impressed by the Council’s allegation that We Love Stoke Lodge was attempting to ‘disrupt or harass the council until it changes its position’. The decision says that the Commissioner ‘does not consider that the effect of receiving the requests would be a significant burden upon an authority the size of the council when compared to the value and purpose behind the requests for information.’
Private Eye reported on the decision in October 2022:
Unfortunately, as we’ve explained previously, this wasn’t our (or the Information Commissioner’s) final tussle with being given the ‘vexatious request’ treatment by BCC.
It seems that there is quite a lot of information about its dealings with Cotham School over Stoke Lodge that BCC really doesn’t want to share. Another current example is how correspondence about making a landowner statement in relation to Stoke Lodge – which is a ‘smoking gun’ for the TVG applications – is still being withheld by BCC (click here to read more). The Council’s refusal of that request is under investigation by the Information Commissioner; it looks as if BCC will try anything to delay disclosing information that helps to prove the case for the TVG.
On a matter that involves public access to important open space for generations to come, that’s a very bad look for BCC.
We need to talk about Stoke Lodge 