Public Inquiry at Lampton Road - what are Hounslow’s Legal & Planning departments up to?
Publicity has been given recently to the struggle through to the higher courts of the land, for one small boater to retain the rights to continue a long-held [150 years +] tradition of mooring to the banks of the ancient river Brent. It is now possible to reveal the role that Hounslow Council has taken, in seeking to circumvent the Appeal Court rulings against the Canal & River Trust [CART].During preparations for my appeal to the Royal Courts of Justice [against the eviction notices that the predecessors of the Canal & River Trust had served on my boats], I had applied to Hounslow Council for a “Lawful Use Certificate” for the mooring of my boats. This is a certificate that Local Planning Authorities [LPA’s] are obliged to issue upon application, if the “use” applied for does not require planning permission, or alternatively has been carried on for at least 10 years.The purpose of the application had its roots in the 2012 judgment by Mr Justice Hildyard of the High Court [recently discredited and set aside], to the effect that I had to produce evidence of some positive right to moor, if I wished to escape the waterways authority’s accusation that the boats were moored “without lawful authority”.Mindful that such a certificate alone would have sufficed to pre-empt any action on their s.8 Notices, the Canal & River Trust acted to persuade Hounslow Council against issuing the certificate before the then pending trial took place. In submitting a 4 page set of arguments for the Council planning officer to use, they requested that their submission be “treated sensitively”. It is to the eternal discredit of the Planning AND Legal departments of Hounslow Council that they interpreted this as a request that the submissions be kept secret from the applicant – and that they unlawfully acted in accordance with that understanding. The upshot was that they refused to disclose the content or even the tenor of the submission against the application, and unilaterally, in defiance of the regulations governing their conduct, refused the application after long months of delay, without any chance given to the applicant to answer points at issue. Having subsequently goaded the legal department into first producing the submissions and then having a face-to-face meeting, the advice was taken to prepare a second and simpler application requiring no evidence of use at all. Once again, CART intervened effectively, and protracted processes were claimed to be unavoidable so that the date for production of the Certificate in time for the Appeal came and went, and I consequently withdrew that second application.The Planning Inspectorate [PINS] appeal having been lodged, CART once again repeated their objections online, and the Council’s position in regard to the appeal hardened – moving from the claimed readiness to concede that a certificate would be granted, to a reversion to the original discredited claims for the unlawful status of the moorings.In short, instead of simply conceding the facts that they had been presented with, the Council dug in their heels and procured the services of a high-powered barrister – who, last Tuesday 12th March, had to leave home at 0630 hours to force her way out through the snow-bound roads of Kent, to reach the Civic Centre in time for the Public Inquiry. How many thousands of pounds of council tax payers money were spent on this fruitless exercise will probably never be known – but the barrister came primed by CART with extraordinary [and ordinarily persuasive] arguments against the lawfulness of the moorings.Faced with a few blunt truths that she apparently had been kept in ignorance of, the barrister made a brave attempt at mitigating the situation for the Council – but they were intransigent about backing off, and so in the end, we spent a day arguing over whether some pot plants had been in place for more than 10 years or not.That utterly ludicrous situation was where we ended up despite my pleas to the planning committee to intervene, and despite promises from the planning chairman Theo Dennison to investigate the situation, months before we ended up in this farce.Why the Council acted so unlawfully in support of an old enemy [British Waterways, now CART] in so intransigent a fashion, and why the planning committee should have supported such unlawful behaviour, is frankly incomprehensible. Even less understandable is how the legal department could be so utterly debauched as to have not only encouraged such unlawful behaviour but urged defence of the indefensible as they did – at such cost to the taxpayer. Is it not about time that some serious independent investigation into the Council was carried out? The Council’s salaried officers are evidently a law unto themselves, and our elected officers are pusillanimously powerless before them. Is that a state of affairs we should be content with? "Yes Prime Minister" is reality not fiction, and such farce is amusing only on the TV screen.
Nigel Moore ● 4978d11 Comments ● 4970d