LOCAL RESIDENTS should now find it easier to block development plans on open spaces that they used for activities such as dog-walking and football thanks to a ruling by the House of Lords earlier this summer. In a test case about the Trap Grounds, a 6-acre scrubland site in North Oxford used by locals for walking and wildlife watching, Catherine Robinson, a local resident, applied to Oxfordshire County Council to register the Grounds as a town green.
The landowner, Oxford City Council, had planned to develop the Grounds. The county council held an inquiry and it was recommended that part of the land be registered. However, technical questions that affected this and other cases concerning town and village greens across the country led the case into the courts.
To many people, village greens evoke images of warm beer and cricket, or maybe memories of the sounds of the 1968 album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. But what village greens evoked in the minds of the law lords was most likely to have been some legislation that took effect three years before. Under this 1965 Act, locals may apply to have land registered as a village or town green if it has been continually used for 20 years or more, for lawful sports and pastimes “as of right”, without the need for any special permission from the landowner.
“Lawful sports and pastimes” can include a wide range of activities – the courts have considered dog-walking, blackberry-picking and kite-flying among them. Registration of land as a green invokes Victorian planning statutes that make development there virtually impossible.
Critical to the Trap Grounds case – and several others waiting on it — was the definition of the 20-year period. Did it run until the registration application, or until the registration itself?
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If the latter, as the Court of Appeal decided, then a landowner could simply put up a fence or “access prohibited” notice (as Oxford City Council did) after the application was made and so break the continuity of the 20-year period in every application, causing each one to fail.
The House of Lords (in a move that foreshadows similar changes in the Commons Bill) decided that this position was incorrect in law and that the 20 years should end on the application, not the registration, endorsing both Oxfordshire County Council’s inquiry into the Trap Grounds and the judge, Mr Justice Lightman, on this point.
The decision also provides valuable guidance on whether registration authorities can amend town or village green applications and the type of rights that registration gives.
Above all, the decision has given the go-ahead to similar open-space cases across the country that were waiting on the law lords’ ruling. The law lords have made the law clearer for all concerned with town and village green disputes. But it is unlikely that developers and dog-walkers will view the decision with equal measures of appreciation.
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The author is a legal affairs commentator on television