BCC suing itself? What in the world is going on?

It’s been a while since our last post, but a lot has been happening! Here’s the inside track.

Stoke Lodge was registered as a village green on 22 August 2023. That matters because the register is conclusive evidence of everything in it and only the court has power to amend the register now. Here’s the entry:

At the end of November, Cotham School issued proceedings under section 14 of the Commons Registration Act 1965 to ask the High Court to consider whether this entry should remain as it is, or be amended or removed. We talked about this process in earlier blog posts here and here. That means, essentially, the High Court examining all our evidence to check that the legal tests are met.

Cotham School chose to launch this claim against three defendants: (1) Bristol City Council as Commons Registration Authority [the CRA has to be a party, otherwise any instruction regarding the register would not be binding on them]; (2) Katharine Welham, the TVG applicant on behalf of the community; and (3) Bristol City Council as Landowner. So Bristol City Council is listed as two defendants, and that’s partly what triggered the court hearing this week – the Judge wanted to know why the case had been set up that way.

Here is Cotham School’s explanation, which they published on 10 January 2024:

So Cotham’s plan, from the start, was that BCC would object to the registration of the land even though BCC itself had registered the land. It’s interesting that the school went public with this before any other information about it was in the public domain – perhaps in an attempt to make sure BCC did what it wanted?

What’s peculiar is that on 10 January, none of the parties knew that the Judge was about to call everyone to court to ask questions about how Cotham had set the case up – that only happened on 12 January. It appears that before then, Cotham School was 100% confident that it had the position sewn up and that in very short order the parties would change to: Cotham School and BCC vs BCC and the community.

But putting this into the public domain started a firestorm that was in full force at the Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee meeting on 22 January. You can watch the meeting on this link. Councillors were unanimous in their opposition both (a) to the suggestion that their decision to register was not being actively defended by their lawyers, and (b) to the idea that other officers in the Council were attempting to challenge and undermine that decision.

What’s important to know is that decisions about village greens, like planning decisions, are fully delegated to the relevant committee under the Council’s constitution. By law and by the constitution, they are not matters for the executive or for political interference, and Committee members were clear that the Council would never try to challenge a decision of a planning committee. So what was going on here? Councillors used words like “shocking”, “abhorrent”, “bizarre”, “disrespectful”, “unlawful” – you can see local press coverage of the meeting here and here. As Councillor Jackson said:

“This is a precedent and I’m absolutely disgusted that we are actually talking about this. Someone up that chain of decision-making decides to ignore what we’ve said? That cannot be the case, and that cannot ever happen on any regulatory committee that elected members are overturned because someone decides that what we said, they didn’t like.”

And so the way Cotham set up the case failed to take account of both:

• the fact that the Council is a single corporate body and can only be one party to any legal action; and
• the constitution of the Council itself, which delegates all issues relating to village greens to the PROWG Committee. Officers cannot override the Committee’s decisions on a whim.

Right now, we’re awaiting the formal decision of the Judge from the hearing on 24 January, but as reported here, he was clear on the day that the Council ‘was not like an amoeba that could split in two’: ‘there is only one Bristol City Council. It has a lot of different duties and powers but it’s only one entity.’

Dealing with extra challenges like this obviously makes this expensive legal process even more costly. If you’d like to help defend public access to Stoke Lodge, and help us ensure that the opposing parties have to play by the rules, you can donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/we-love-stoke-lodge-legal-funds or contact us at welovestokelodge@gmail.com. We’re very grateful for your support!