01 Jul 2024
Campaigners fighting the proposed rail freight terminal on Green Belt land in St Albans will decide later this week whether to lodge an appeal against a High Court decision that denied their application for a judicial review into the way the land was sold by Herts county council.
“We still believe we have a strong case, ” said Cllr Nuala Webb one of the leaders of the Save St Albans: Fight the Freight group. ” We are still waiting for the written judgement and will need to go through that in detail with our lawyers to decide whether we have grounds for appeal.
“The judge was clear that the councillors who agreed to buy the 300 acre site for £1 in the 1980s intended to preserve it as open space for the benefit of the community.
“But somewhere along the line there was a change of policy at County Hall. We found a document written by a trainee solicitor which says the council could assume the land was bought under a different act. But although this was no more than an assumption it seems to have shaped the way the council treated the land since.
“Crucially in 2017 they changed an agreement with a local farmer. He’d previously had a rolling three month grazing licence which is common for open space. But in 2017 he was offered a tenancy which he says included obligations to prevent trespassing on the land.
“The judge ruled the tenancy agreement was evidence that the land was not open space. Our belief is that if the land was indeed designated open space then the council was not in position to legally offer the tenancy agreement and our argument would stand.
“We have gone through thousands of pages of documents from the County Hall archives. However key documents from the two years around the time of the sale in the mid 1980s and which would clarify so much are missing. Herts county council say they cannot find them.”
Save St Albans: Fight the Freight have been heartened by a similar case in Shropshire where the court of appeal ruled a local council had sold land unlawfully because it was designated open space.
“That gives us hope, ” said Cllr Webb. “The Shropshire campaigners faced setback after setback before winning their case at the highest court. We know we have a strong moral argument but we now need to consider very carefully whether we have a strong enough legal argument for a successful appeal.”
