BCC: when timing is everything

Here’s an interesting thing. We know that Cotham School was told about the Council’s u-turn in their favour on the curtilage issue on 21 September 2018. We’ve seen the email from Gary Collins to Mike Jackson reporting back on that the following week, and there’s plenty of other correspondence from Cotham expressing their satisfaction with the new situation.

And we know, because it was very clear in that email, that Gary Collins had then requested a barrister’s Opinion ‘to ensure we have a robust position in the event of the inevitable legal challenge from residents’. And that Opinion was received on 28 September (and remember, he told Cotham that there were ‘no surprises there’).

But this isn’t the story that BCC wants to tell about its actions. On 16 January 2019, Gary Collins wrote to WLSL and the local Ward Councillors stating:

As referenced there, Gary Collins had said the same in person to Councillors on the Development Control Committee on 19 December 2018. It’s very clear that the narrative was supposed to be “Yes, we changed our minds, and we did it using information in the letter from Cotham’s planning consultants [without verifiying it], but only on the basis of external legal advice.” That’s the ‘robust position’ he wanted, to face down the ‘inevitable legal challenge’ from local residents (click here to see the email where he says this).

But there’s a problem, isn’t there – it’s just not true. The Council decided to remove curtilage status and told Cotham that before it even requested the external legal advice. And it’s surprisingly coy about this fact – on top of deliberately misleading Councillors in the examples above, it also misled the Local Government Ombudsman about it. Here’s the question BCC was asked by the Ombudsman, and BCC’s response:

You’ve seen the email from Gary Collins to Mike Jackson on 24 September. There was nothing remotely fluid about the Council’s view – its mind was made up and the decision was delivered before Counsel’s Opinion was even requested (which was on 21 September, after the meeting with the school), let alone received.

The Council really wants us, you, and the Ombudsman, to think that it did things in the right order – that it got the external advice and then changed its mind. But that’s just not true. So how come the Ombudsman didn’t pick up on this? It did ask BCC for all the relevant information and emails – but it turns out that BCC failed to share that crucial 24 September 2018 email with the Ombudsman, effectively misdirecting the investigation into the Council’s decision-making process on that matter. An unfortunate oversight? Or something else?

BCC didn’t hand that email over to us willingly, either – it took until 4 July 2021 and an investigation by the Information Commissioner to tease it out of them, and even then there were other email threads that were apparently not shared with the Ombudsman and were not disclosed to us.

If BCC thinks its hands are clean on this issue, why has it tried so hard to cover up what it did, even to the extent of misleading the Local Government Ombudsman?