Bob Milton

Day 4.

On the fourth day of Christmas:

When highway authorities such as the Highways Agency or the County Highway Authority take common land be it manorial waste or subject to commoners rights registered or not it has always been that compensation is paid to the land owner. In the case of publicly owned or land to which the public has rights of access then exchange land must be given unless Special Parliamentary Procedure is carried out. This is usually where there is no exchange land is available. Two other matters need to be taken into account. The first is the quality of the exchange land requires to be taken into account [Esher common 1975]. The second is if the taken land is for road schemes but is less than 250 sq yds. This has now been up dated in the Commons Act 2006 to 200m and is cumulative. What was being allowed by the Minister was death of the commons by small insertions as highway authorities were putting in multiple small schemes and claiming the exemption. We hope the minister and the delegated officers in the planning inspectorate keep their wits about themselves. As there is no penalty and the Inspectorate does not keep cumulative records it will be up to the public again.

A good example of the reliance the public has on the good offices of Government departments is the time it has taken to register exchange land by the Highways Agency. Over the last fifty years there has been a dearth of registrations. Some like the A3 at Wisley still have not been applied for let alone been recorded on the Commons registers. With the impending 10year CROW review and updating of the Registers this does not bode well for public access.

It can of case be even more complex as was seen with the delays with the exchange land for Chobham Common for the M3 which we have been assured have now been applied for. In the case of the Hook commons further south on the M3, the interchange was built on the common taking about one third of the middle and best public access land. No exchange land was given for the s193 equestrian access land or the contiguous commons that were built on. The commoners were not compensated but it seems at least one land owner was. This was all during the start of the 1965 Commons Registration Act. Correspondence has recently come to light from the Commons Registrar at Hampshire County Council when a commoner tried to register her rights only to be told that the registrar was sure the Highways Agency has acted lawfully and would not take the registration even though the road was not built and no CPO had been completed.

This kind of dealing between the Highways Agency and the Commons Registrars is also seen in the non registration of part of the M27 near Fareham which was not registered even though the motorway was not built and no CPO made as the route was changed leaving the original planned route as a swathe through a registered urban common.