- Why did Hampshire County Council not act in the public interest and on our behalf to see that the illegal fencing was removed?

- It seems to me that Hampshire County Council have a lot of explaining to do and I hope that will continue through this medium so that local people can begin to understand what really happened to deprive them of their rights to ‘air and exercise’ on the whole of Broxhead Common.

Says Maureen Comber

First of all I would like to thank Sheila Checkley for her excellent article in this weeks Bordon Herald entitled ‘BROXHEAD COMMON ROW ERUPTS AGAIN’.

Your readers will have noted that the only way I am able to communicate with Hampshire County Council over this matter, is through your pages as I have been told that further communication from me may be considered unreasonable and result in the implementation of their policy on unreasonable behaviour!!

As Sheila says, 50 years is a very long time, I would say much too long for the peculiar circumstances existing on Broxhead Common east of the B3004 to prevail. Broxhead Common is to be found listed in the Headley Tithe Apportionments Act 1847 and awarded as a ‘common’ used by a number of people and without an owner. How is it I wonder, that less than one hundred and 20 years later it suddenly acquires an owner? Commons with no known owner were usually vested in the Crown for protection or under the Commons Registration Act 1965, s.9, vested with the Parish or local council.

I know that Patricia Barnard and the many commoners of Broxhead, in particular the late John Ellis, Chair of Headley Parish Council at the time, and founder of the Broxhead Commoners Association in 1968, made it abundantly clear that the fencing of 80 acres of common land was not permitted and was illegal.

They fought long and hard and at great expense to free the common for the ‘benefit of the neighbourhood’. They succeeded. So why did Hampshire County Council not act in the public interest and on our behalf to see that the illegal fencing was removed?

In their letter to me dated 31st October 2012, HCC say that the provisional registration was challenged in 1970 and the Commons Commissioner instructed them to remove the land from the register following a Court of Appeal Order. They go on to say that they have previously sent a copy of that Order to me, but as I explained to them, it had page 3 missing. Strangely the same page was also missing from the one supplied to me from John Ellis many years ago and another from the landowners agent supplied to Sarah Walters of the Committee Division, Chief Executive’s Dept. of Hampshire County Council on 7th January 2002, in respect to CROW 2000. (open access). No complete copy of the Consent Order from the Appeal Court was to be found even at the registration department of HCC.

I thought the pages had been misnumbered until Counsel told me in 2011, that the page was actually missing. I searched and searched for it and at last found a copy through a colleague, obtained under FOI a few years previously. It turns out that the only Order the Court of Appeal made that day on 23rd May 1978, was for the dismissal of the appeal “out of that court” upon withdrawal of the matter from the Court. No judgement could therefore be made and no Orders given by anyone.

It seems to me that Hampshire County Council have a lot of explaining to do and I hope that will continue through this medium so that local people can begin to understand what really happened to deprive them of their rights to ‘air and exercise’ on the whole of Broxhead Common.