The Battle for Broxhead Common
The Case for Hampshire County Council – PART 38
- 21st April 2011. I asked HCC Chief Executives if they could find any trace of page 3. Their reply was negative with advice to contact the Court of Appeal.
2011 HCC Chief Exec email - My lawyers had done that already and drawn a blank, so I was wondering where to look next when I had a stroke of luck. My friend Jim Colbourne reminded me that my Mackenzie friend, Bob Milton had submitted an foi at the end of September 2009 about papers concerning the Court of Appeal hearing in May 1978. It was worth an ask.
- 3rd May 2011. As luck would have it, Bob came up trumps and supplied me with a copy of the whole document including the missing page 3.
- It was only now that I learnt that the Court of Appeal, far from ordering Hampshire County Council to remove the 80 acres from the Register, had dismissed the case from out of that Court.
2011 Search for page 3 - Of course, if the Court had not heard the case and reviewed the evidence, then it could not order anything. In any case it cannot make any order which is perverse or against the public interest.
- There had therefore been no Court Order to remove the 80 acres from the Register of Common Land as we had been led to believe all these years!
- The case had been dismissed on the terms of the Schedule. This is simply an agreement between the Parties involved and had been misused to appear as an actual Order of the Court.
Broxhead Consent Order CA 197802072017.pdf with page 3 - The Court of Appeal knew that for the Schedule to apply, application for the unauthorised fencing would first have to be made to the Secretary of State, as stated on page 4 of the Consent Order.
- However, such application has never been made either by the ‘said’ landowner or Hampshire County Council, who as usual ignored the law and carried on regardless.
Next time: Another Public Inquiry but this time I am represented by a barrister.