The Ashton Vale village green area marked, top, and Bristol City FC's Ashton gate stadium
As recently as May 4, it seemed that the long and often fractious legal dispute over the status of six fields in the Green Belt at Ashton Vale was finally coming to, well, if not quite the end, at least the beginning of the end.
On that date, Bristol City Council said it would no longer be contesting the judicial review of its decision not to register the northern part of those fields as a Town Green.
Their press release stated that the Judicial Review was “seeking to have the High Court instruct the City Council to consider afresh the non-registration of the Northern part of the site as a Town or Village Green, by referring back evidence relating to this matter to an independent expert inspector to consider, and make recommendations accordingly to the council committee which will then decide the matter afresh”.
In the release 
the Council confirmed that it had decided “to cease to contest the legal challenge, and therefore accept these outcomes should happen forthwith”.
The press release also accepted that the council should “ immediately register the narrow strip at the North-East side of the site [shown in this map in orange] as Town or Village Green land, without any further reference to the independent inspector, or to the council committee” and that this should also happen forthwith.
This latter piece of land – “the Silbury Strip”- was the main topic of my October 2011 article on this website.
In that article I argued that the Council had, for whatever reason, failed to implement the decision of the Public Rights of Way and Greens (PROWG) committee correctly by failing to register the full extent of the land that had been decided should be registered as a Town Green.
Specifically, they had failed to fully register the land referred to as “C” in the plan presented to the PROWG committee on June 16.
This plan is quite clearly a later version of the s.106 plan that accompanied the Ashton Vale Stadium development. The main difference between the two maps is that in the PROWG version, the Town Green area has been divided into three distinct areas of land marked A, B and C, each of which is delineated by the addition of black lines to the s.106 map. These black lines do not appear on any other plan.
However, despite this, the officer responsible for registering B and C as Town Green land registered a smaller extent of land than that delineated by the black lines in the PROWG plan.
When this reduced registration was challenged by the applicants, the officer concerned gave a statement to the October 6 PROWG committee in which he stated that the plan “shows the three coloured areas, together with a key. These were area A (yellow), area B (pink) and area C (white). …. The land to be registered, and which in the opinion of the officer satisfied the statutory test, was that comprising areas B and C to the South of B. Area A, coloured yellow, was recommended not to be registered”.
No explanation of what the purpose of the black lines were if not to delineate A, B and C and no recognition that if indeed areas A, B and C were identified by specific blocks of colour, that left two areas on the plan coloured blue whose Town Green status had been left undetermined by the committee.
The explanation given was clearly a flawed attempt to re-interpret the committee decision to explain away the fact that a different extent of land was registered post-committee, for reasons unknown but possibly related to the requirements of the Ashton Vale to Temple Meads BRT scheme.
Therefore, the May 4 press release, with its apparent acceptance that the Silbury Strip should have been registered, along with its recognition that the additional evidence that was relied upon to recommend the non-registration of the Northern part of the Ashton Vale fields should be placed in front of an independent inspector, appeared to offer the opportunity to finally start the process towards a final resolution of the Ashton Vale saga.
Unfortunately, it has become clear that in terms of indicating the future intentions of the Council, statements on the Council website are apt to have an usefulness equivalent to the provision of bicycles for fish.
It now appears that despite publicly stating that it will not be contesting the Judicial Review, and despite having missed the relevant deadlines for filing critical documents, the council is nevertheless now attempting to perform a U-turn in regards to its publicly stated intentions on the Council website.
Contrary to its acceptance, as stated on its own website, that the Silbury Strip should be registered as Town Green “without any further reference to the independent inspector, or to the council committee”, the Council is now apparently retracting from this position.
Such an order to register land as Town Green can only be implemented lawfully if the council determines that the original intention of the PROWG was to indeed register the land in question and the council is now insisting that there is in fact doubt as to whether this was indeed the intention.
In support of this, the council has, within the last 48 hours, apparently introduced an alternative explanation for why the Silbury Strip was not registered, an explanation which has never been previously offered, or mentioned in public, prior to now.
The council has also tried to retract from its position of placing the “additional evidence” in front of an independent inspector, suggesting instead that the council be free to choose an alternative method of assessing the validity of the evidence, presumably one that does not necessarily involve an independent inspector.
As a result, it now looks increasingly likely as this goes to press, that unless there is yet another U-turn by the Council, there will indeed be a court case next week, despite the Council as Defendant having issued a press release a month ago stating that it was intending to withdraw from the case.
What, in the absence of any detailed filing of grounds, evidence or even a skeleton argument by the Defendant, the court will actually be asked to adjudicate on, is, at the moment, a matter of pure conjecture.
Hi Henry. I'm agreeing with arry. The BRT route marked the boundary. As I said, a deal was done between the council and developer at the original planning application. The cost of moving the original BRT route, which should have been met by the developer, was offset by him giving up some of his land for the new route, at, from memory, an estimated cost of £5 million, which made it a very expensive piece of land. Again from memory, I believe it would also have been part of the stadium flood defence, which meant they were giving up very little.
Paul,
The point here is that the recommendation of the officer who produced the report for the council was that land south of the BRT route should be made a Town Green.
The Council are now trying to argue that this actually meant the land south of land scheduled to be compulsory purchased for the BRT which includes land north and south of the BRT route itself.
What has been completely forgotten is that the purpose of the report was supposedly to determine which land qualified to be registered as Town Green based on its usage over the previous 20 years.
By bringing out this argument, the council has given up all pretence that the recommendation to the PROW committee made by the officer concerned had anything to do with the previous use of the land (which was what they were supposed to be making a decision about) and has everything to do with the intended future use of the land for a BRT route (and, of course, a stadium).
I thought the strip of land for the BRT was "given" by the developer to compensate for the extra cost of re-routing the BRT around the stadium, so logically this would be part of the " non village green " area. I remember thinking that the estimated cost being £5 million, would make the total site worth a fortune!
1. Who owns the land is irrelevant to the question of it being TVG. The only issue is use.
2. The strip is not part of the BRT. It lies below the BRT route but contains the
main entrance to the land and the right of way path.
3. In any event, all the land remains owned by Vence Ltd (Lansdown).
I can't make sense of any of this.
This is beyond any sort of comment – by now the only phrase that springs to mind is – gross corruption of process. Great achievement for Bristol, the green capital which wants to find any way possible to subvert legal processes to give our green belt to greedy tax exiles.
What a mess.
Hasn't the council's legal services chief MacNamara been given his P45 yet?
Not sure how much you can blame McNamara for this.
Expect he is simply following Orders.
Expect he is simply following Orders.
Ah, the Nuremberg defence.
Still it's happening on his watch, arry.
But those who give him the Orders are also the ones who would sack him.
Cook, Ormondroyd, Godfrey
Cook & Co forgot to look at Kent's beloved bent-bus Brt2 route which munches a big chunk of the Silbury strip. And they've got it in for locals now the JR's called the bluff on the PROW stitch-up.
Except if you look at all the plans and maps, the BRT doesn't encroach on the Silbury Strip. The Strip is shown as all trees, with a right of way path down the centre. Even Cllr Cook's victory press release acknowledged that the Silbury Strip would be public open space.
It makes no sense at all, unless BCC are seeking to block the main entrance to the TVG, which is in the Silbury Strip.
According to a senior Labour figure at the hustings in Southmead last week, that decision has already been made by Cook
True the munched hedgerow is nearer the car auction.
I propose the council is as bent as a BRT bus route.