The week in WLSL…

Last week the High Court spoke loud and clear, telling Bristol City Council that it can’t ‘suck and blow’ at the same time – in less colourful language, BCC can only be one defendant in this case, so Cotham School’s hopes that it would ‘jump the fence’ and take over as claimant for them have been dashed.

Secondly, the Court ruled that Cotham School is not entitled to costs protection in this litigation. That is a huge problem for the school, because this is a particularly expensive type of claim – much more so than a judicial review, because the Court has to go through all the evidence and take a new decision for itself. But remember, it doesn’t need to be a problem for the school at all, because there’s no reason why Cotham can’t do PE on the village green, in the same way that other schools use parks and public access playing fields.

We talked about the cost of the litigation in our previous post (link here), but here’s the relevant bit of the judgment:

The community is represented by the second defendant – the first figures quoted there are our costs since Cotham School launched this claim. The claimant (the school) has said that the one-day hearing last week cost it just under £23,500 (compared to our £25k + VAT – but bear in mind that we were fighting three parties and the school was only fighting us). The school lost the hearing, so the first in a long line of things that has to happen is that by 4pm on Friday 9 February we will file our submissions for the Judge to decide which party should pay how much of our hearing costs.

The same deadline was set for the school to indicate whether it would apply for leave to appeal the decision on costs. But Cotham didn’t need that long to decide – it drafted submissions on the same day that the decision came out, and we have until Monday to respond to those. But think about this for a minute – the school’s business manager has sworn a statement, as you can see from the extract above, that the school simply cannot afford to spend more than £70k on this litigation. How that sits with the school’s expectation that it will cost them £100k is not clear. But we do know that so far, their costs are c£23,500 for the hearing plus thousands more than that for launching the claim in the first place; and they will now have to pay our costs – perhaps as much again. They have paid for submissions seeking leave to appeal. And if they were to get that, they would be paying for a Court of Appeal hearing which would be at least as expensive as this one (probably significantly more) and they would be on risk of having to pay our costs for that too.

At what point will Cotham’s governors – or their parent body – say ‘enough is enough’? Because the thing is, this hasn’t even really got going yet. There will be a case management hearing to come (another one day in court) and if it goes to full trial, that will be a hugely expensive 8-10 days in court.

Or, Cotham School could come back after half term and do PE at Stoke Lodge. It’s entirely ‘in their court’.