BCC: choosing to act on bad information

We’ve explained previously that BCC officers confirmed to Cotham School in July 2018 that the playing fields were the curtilage of a listed building, so that a planning application would be required for a fence. Cotham then sought a meeting with planning officers, taking along an external planning consultant to plead their case (who was apparently doing this for no charge, although it’s not clear why he would have agreed to act for free). Gary Collins, the Head of Development Management, told the school that he would be prepared to reconsider the Council’s position ‘if a case could be made’.

And so the planning consultant wrote a letter to BCC on behalf of Cotham School. The letter claims that it would be ‘pivotal and devastating’ for Cotham to have to go through a proper planning consultation process in order to put up a perimeter fence. Why would it be ‘pivotal and devastating’ to have to make a planning application? Presumably because the BCC planning team had firmly rejected the same proposal when the school made it previously.

That’s right, the school had made a planning aapplication for exactly the same fence in late 2016, and officers slammed it for its poor design, for creating a ‘more threatening environment’ and for failing to address the impact on Stoke Lodge house, a heritage asset. They also said that restricting access to a 5m strip in parts was ‘a provocation’ (the reality is that the perimeter walkways left outside the fence are much narrower than that in places – so even more provocative).

In his letter, the planning consultant claimed that prior to July 2018 BCC officers had never suggested that the parkland had special curtilage status. Gary Collins could easily have checked and seen that this was untrue – years of planning and tree works applications on Bristol Planning Online show that listed building constraints apply to the whole of the estate. So that was a false claim. Here is the record for the school’s previous fence application showing permitted development rights were removed (so the school clearly knew that the ‘fact’ it was claiming wasn’t true):

The planning consultant also printed off a number of old maps that he said demonstrated that the land had been in other uses and therefore couldn’t be considered to be the parkland of a historic estate – for example, he claimed that the land had been used as allotments:

But if you know Stoke Lodge, you can see that the allotments are somewhere else. Was that a deliberate lie or just incompetence? Perhaps he didn’t know where the boundaries of Stoke Lodge are and that’s why he didn’t mark them on the map, but the allotments marked are certainly outside those boundaries. And again, the planning team should have known that – or could easily have checked. The letter is riddled with other errors, including the misquoting of guidance from Historic England and a repeated claim that officers have never previously considered the land to have curtilage status.

Even the most basic effort by Gary Collins or his team to verify the information in this letter would have shown that none of its claims held water. But apparently no one ever bothered to verify it. The letter was treated as if its claims were true and was passed to the BCC legal team to give a view on whether permitted development rights should apply. And the legal team came back and said that based on that information – that unverified, largely false, information – ‘on the balance of probabilities’ BCC could take the view that the curtilage was a smaller area, directly surrounding the house.

We haven’t seen that legal advice, of course – it’s privileged. Nor have we seen the question that was put to the legal team. Was it a neutral question based on full facts, or was it ‘Does this give us enough to say that permitted development rights apply?’ – those two questions are very different in both intent and outcome. The Council has a legal duty to take reasonable steps to acquaint itself with the relevant information to enable it properly to perform a relevant function. So it should have taken reasonable steps to fact-check the letter and ensure it was correct, and it seems that this was never done.

Perhaps it has never occurred to Mr Collins that a developer seeking a specific planning-related decision would try to skew things in their own favour by making false claims? Perhaps we’re all just too cynical. Or perhaps this is how it’s done, by deliberately turning a blind eye as long as people play the game and the Council can claim it went through the right processes.