Village Green - anniversary news
HBM
On 1st September 2009 I handed in my application to register the Downs as a village green. For more than four years Canterbury City Council has fought the application tooth and nail, against the wishes of the public, and spending over £50,000 in the process.
The Regulation Committee at Kent County Council (who decide whether or not to register land as a village green) met at the beginning of September. We were expecting VGA614 (our application) to be considered or resolved at this meeting, but it wasn't.
As you'll see in Section 5 of the first document below, there were 5 cases to be heard "in the next few weeks", but ours isn't one of them. And as you'll see in the second document, KCC are "awaiting legal advice" on our application.
KCC are in a rather tricky position. They decided, quite rightly, that this case was too complex for them to handle alone, and so employed a barrister to act as Inspector at a Public Inquiry. She recommended that about 85% of the Downs should be registered.
Canterbury City Council protested that her report was legally flawed, so KCC called in another barrister. (They couldn't re-use the first barrister, as would normally happen, because she had since been made a judge and was therefore out of bounds.) The second barrister recommended that about 5% of the land be registered.
So KCC are faced with a knotty problem, having two conflicting recommendations from their own independent legal experts. Whichever way they decide, they lay themselves open to the possibility of judicial review because either side can claim one of the independent recommendations is correct and should not have been ignored. Tricky.
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