Judicial review process discontinued

We can now confirm that Cotham School’s application for leave to go to judicial review has been discontinued, with the consent of both the defendant (Bristol City Council) and the interested party (Kathy Welham on behalf of the community). That doesn’t mean it’s all over – Cotham is still continuing with its section 14 application, to ask the court to look afresh at all the evidence supporting TVG registration for Stoke Lodge.

So what’s going on here?

Long-term watchers of our saga will remember that Cotham School filed an application for leave to go to judicial review last September, and then immediately put it on pause so that it could launch its section 14 litigation.

Sidebar: quick explanation of the difference between the two claims:

• A judicial review looks only at whether the decision of the Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee was properly reached in June 2023. If Cotham won this claim in court, the decision would go back to the Committee to be reconsidered.
• The section 14 claim, on the other hand, involves the High Court looking at the legal test for TVG status and making the decision for itself about whether the test is met. This is a much more expensive form of litigation than a judicial review, and presents high costs risks for the school.

So Cotham started the JR process and put it on hold (but the judge agreed with our request that the stay should be limited to six months). Then Cotham launched the section 14 proceedings, and a few weeks ago the six month stay for the JR process expired. All the parties had to make submissions about what should happen next.

So what happened?

We argued that it was highly unlikely that the government would decide that reforming TVG legislation was a top priority for it and, more importantly, that it was nonsense for the school to suggest that if section 14 was repealed, that would be done without any transitional provision for ongoing claims. We’ve been saying this from the start, and the court agreed. The section 14 proceedings are under way, and you can’t run multiple forms of litigation about the same thing.

So, the JR is now consigned to history. The next date coming up is a case and costs management conference in the section 14 proceedings, on 13 May, as mentioned in press reports of last week’s Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee meeting here and here.