BCC/Cotham: too cosy for comfort?

We already know that the school was told on 21 September 2018 that the Council had done a U-turn and removed curtilage status from the parkland around Stoke Lodge.

But you can see two things here – first, Gary Collins was going to get an opinion from an external barrister to back up its new position ready for the ‘inevitable legal challenge’ from residents. That barrister’s opinion was based, of course, on the same bad information as the view from the internal team. And our Ward councillors have never been allowed to see a copy of the barrister’s opinion, even under conditions of confidentiality (link here) – an unusual (possibly unprecedented) situation.

We also don’t know what question was put to the barrister, but we know that when the answer came back, this is how Gary Collins communicated it to the school:

‘No surprises there’. It’s an odd way to communicate what the barrister’s conclusion was, don’t you think? Unless both parties already knew it was set up to be a foregone conclusion…

Secondly, it was still the Council’s view that the school would need landlord consent under the terms of the lease. This wasn’t likely to be a big obstacle, as you can see from Gary Collins’ email to Mike Jackson above, and he made it even clearer to Cotham School on the 27th of September:

As an aside, here’s Sandra Fryer’s response to that email:

Cosy, isn’t it? Wouldn’t want to give the community a ‘chink to pop at’. Or, you know, any voice in a consultation process. It is absolutely clear that Cotham School felt it now had the Council in its pocket – here are some other examples:

This is the start of a letter from Jo Butler, Head of Cotham School, to Mike Jackson, referring to a meeting with him on 20 August (only 3 days after the school’s free planning consultant sent its error-filled letter – the ink was barely dry). Notice that she left that meeting – way before any legal advice was received – reassured that the Council was on the school’s side:

And, in similar vein, here’s Sandra Fryer, the Chair of Governors, the day after being given BCC’s u-turn decision on curtilage, content that the Council is now ‘fully engaged’ with Cotham ‘as you were when the TVG was first submitted’:

Even the Legal Services team seems to have been cosier with Cotham then you might imagine, passing on to Cotham a copy of a letter sent to WLSL and asking the school to keep that quiet (the rest of us spend years stuck in FOI limbo trying to get access to documents but if you’re in the in-crowd you don’t even have to ask):

In amongst all this cosiness, we know that ultimately the Council’s view was that the ‘fence is not a structure’ and that landlord consent was not required for the fence. So what happened? Tune in next time…