Private Eye retrospective 2: a very expensive fence

We’ve explained previously (click here) that even after the Council had performed a u-turn at Cotham’s request and removed curtilage status from the playing fields, it was still the Council’s position 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. Officers had described the school’s previous proposal (which was identical to this one) as a ‘poor quality’ design that created a threatening environment and said that the layout (leaving only narrow strips outside the fence) was ‘provocative’.

It was only after the curtilage u-turn, sometime in October or November 2018, that the Council was persuaded to retreat further and hide behind the idea that ‘the fence is not a structure’ so that the Mayor could say, as he did at Full Council in January 2019, that he had ‘no power over this‘.

The Council’s decision that the fence was not a structure was just what Cotham needed to hear, because it never had any intention of changing the design or layout of the fence to align with the Council’s preferences anyway. It had always intended to install weldmesh perimeter fencing. This typically costs around £31/metre and its quotes were around £35k/£40k for the whole perimeter: Sandra Fryer reported these details to the Finance, Premises and General Purposes Committee of the governing body back in March 2015:

The school then applied for grant funding for the fence totalling. £152,700, basing its request on a nice round £100 per metre rather than the £31 it expected to pay, and thereby obtaining a significant amount of extra funding:

Private Eye magazine has taken a close interest in this part of the story.

Back in June 2021, the focus was on how the costs of the fence had apparently escalated dramatically from the £35-40k quoted to Cotham School before it applied for grant funding, to the £152,700 it requested from the Education and Skills Funding Agency to pay for the fence:

The school, meanwhile, assured parents of its ‘robust project management and use of value for money principles’, saying that the fence would cost no more than £65k:

Ultimately, after an audit of the project at the end of 2021, the Education and Skills Funding Agency decided that Cotham’s total grant funding for the fence would be reduced by £55k, as reported here in April 2022:

But the Eye returned in August 2022 to report that the fence had been rather less successful in practice than hoped: