Landowner statements – so now we know

We’ve talked a number of times on this blog about landowner statements, and the fact that Cotham School asked BCC to make one in relation to Stoke Lodge in 2018. The significance of this is that in opposing our applications to register Stoke Lodge as a Town or Village Green, Cotham School spent a lot of time and legal fees on arguing that ‘everyone knew’ that there was a clear objection to use because of the public inquiry in 2016. But a landowner statement is a mechanism with one sole purpose – to end ‘as of right’ use – so if you think that use has already ended, there’s no need to even have a discussion about making a statement.

And now we have the email sent by Cotham School’s facilities manager in May 2018, asking BCC to make a landowner statement ‘to protect against future TVG registration’ (link on WhatDoTheyKnow here).

Notice his repeated theme: the land needs to be protected – against what? Against TVG registration. It’s absolutely apparent that the school thinks TVG registration is a real risk – which means the school did not think that the 2016 public inquiry had brought a clear and definitive end to ‘as of right’ use.

The same individual (no longer employed by Cotham School) made a statement to the PROWG meeting (describing himself as ‘independent of any interested party’) in which he asked ‘How can they now possibly claim they didn’t know their use was contentious?’. Well, now we know that in 2018 and on behalf of Cotham School, he recorded that the school itself did not think use had been made contentious by the previous public inquiry. If it did, it wouldn’t have rushed to request a landowner statement immediately after the High Court decision was handed down.

We also know (see earlier blog post here) that BCC got detailed legal advice about this issue, and on the basis of that advice it decided not to make a landowner statement. So either BCC thought that ‘as of right’ use was still ongoing and it didn’t want to take action to stop that, or it thought 20 years of ‘as of right’ use had already built up, and it didn’t want to provoke another TVG application (which happened anyway because of the school’s subsequent actions). In other words, BCC also didn’t think that the 2016 public inquiry effectively made use contentious.

But the point now is this – on 28 June BCC’s PROWG Committee voted (6 in favour, 1 against, 2 abstentions) to accept our applications for TVG registration. One of its specific reasons was that it did not think people generally knew anything about the public inquiry, so no objection to use had been communicated by it. Cotham School has said that it is considering its next steps – and it needs to consider those steps very carefully, since litigation is always a risky and expensive business. But with new evidence like this continuing to come to light and radically undermining the school’s own arguments, we think it would be very difficult to justify spending education funds on a further legal challenge, particularly in the current financial environment.

As we said immediately after the Committee’s decision, it’s time to move forward together. We stand ready to talk to Cotham about better ways of working together. It’s well-established now that TVG registration does not prevent Cotham School from continuing to use Stoke Lodge as its playing fields – there is no DfE or Ofsted requirement for a fence and TVG status protects the land as playing fields for everyone – school, clubs and informal users.

The past years have been challenging, but we hope that #SenseNotFence finally prevails, and that Cotham School will join us in seizing this opportunity for a fresh start together.