According to the Bristol Post:
A public inquiry into the future of Ashton Vale where Bristol City FC wants to build its new stadium has been put back for nearly a year because of childcare issues, according to the landowners.
In a bit of careful spinning, a spokesperson for the landowners claimed :
However, potential problems with childcare during the holiday period were presented as a reason why this timeframe would not be suitable for the applicants’ legal representatives and witnesses…. It is ludicrous to suffer further lengthy and costly delays for this reason
The article thus appears to suggest that the delay is on the part of SAVE, but in fact the opposite is true. What the article doesn’t mention, but the BBC does, is that it is the landowners who have insisted that a full 10 days would be necessary for their evidence to be fully examined and responded to, and that it was in fact their lead counsel who wasn’t available for that period of time until June next year and, once the summer holidays were discounted because of everyone else being away on holiday, it became October next year.
One has to question why they don’t just get another barrister; if your barrister isn’t available for 11 months to do his job, then he isn’t really available at all. Get someone else, especially since they claim it is ‘ludicrous to suffer further lengthy and costly delays‘.
This seems so obvious that I am left wondering whether, in fact, they are deliberately delaying as long as possible in the hope that new laws will be brought in that will make it harder to register town greens.
3 Comments
Anthony
To suggest at all that their is any plan or reason for the landowners tactics is to greatly overestimate their abilities.
“Omnishambles” could be used to describe the whole stadium project from the moment Lansdown sent in diggers to rip out protected hedgerows without permission or notice to locals in 2008.
It should be a lesson to developers in how not to engage with your neighbours.
There is no chance that any change in the law can be retrospectively applied to this case – that is against all principals of fairness which is a corner stone of our legal system. It might happen in a banana republic or in cloud cuckoo land !
Retrospective? No TVG has been actually granted yet right? The judicial review saw to that.
Hopefully the law will change (as proposed) between now and then, it’s about time.