Court Of Appeal Pulls The Trigger On Town And Village Greens

In the case of Wiltshire Council v Cooper Estates Strategic Land Ltd [2019] EWCA Civ 840, the Court of Appeal ("CA") upheld a High Court ruling which overturned the decision of Wiltshire County Council ("the Council") to register a plot of land as a town or village green ("TVG") owing to the fact that a "trigger event" had occurred.

Background

Section 15 of the Commons Act 2006 ("the Act") grants members of the public the right to apply for land to be registered as a TVG. The effect of such a registration is, for practical purposes, to sterilise the land for development. Since 2006 (and the "Trap Grounds" case)1 the courts have adopted a wide definition of TVG which goes far beyond that which one might expect to constitute a traditional village green: car parks, golf courses and scrubland have all been registered as TVG and, therefore, protected from development. Successive governments grew increasingly concerned that the TVG registration system was being used as a means of stopping developments that might otherwise have been permitted through the planning system.

New legislation

In response, the Act was revised by the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013, which inserted a new Section 15C into the Act. This new Section 15C prevents a TVG registration where a "trigger event" occurs. Trigger events include situations where a development plan, which has been adopted by a local authority, identifies the land for potential development. Once a trigger event has occurred, the land in question could only ever be registered as a TVG if a "terminating event" were to occur (see Section 15C(2) of the Act). Terminating events include situations where a development plan ceases to have effect or is revoked, or a relevant policy is superseded.

Facts of the case

In Wiltshire Council v Cooper Estates, an application was made to the Council by an interested third party to register a small triangular plot of land (totalling 380 square metres) ("the Land") within the settlement boundary of Royal Wootton Bassett as a TVG.

Cooper Estates, the owner of the Land, objected to the application and argued that as the Land had been identified for potential development in the Wiltshire Core Strategy, a trigger event had occurred.

The Wiltshire Core Strategy was adopted by the Council in 2015 and two of its key policies include:

Core Policy 1 ("CP1") which is the settlement strategy identifying settlements, one of which is Royal Wootton Bassett, where sustainable...