08 Jul 2023
It ain’t over ’til it’s over. The county council may have finalised the sale of the former Radlett airfield to rail freight developers Segro, but there is still hope the final scheme can be thwarted.
Campaign group Save St Albans: Fight the Freight is still intending to push for a Judicial Review, but there are other options going forwards.
One argument is around the county council’s role as custodians of the land on behalf of local residents and whether or not they are only entitled to sell if the land is not required for the purpose for which it was bought.
In 1979 Herts county council started negotiations to buy the former airfield to protect its Green Belt status.
LaFarge subsequently bought the land from the receivers in 1980s and were granted a 15-year lease to extract minerals plus a further six years to re-instate and restore for Green Belt use – before selling to HCC for £1.
In 1983 a meeting of the planning development control and urgency sub committee recorded: “The restoration of this site to agriculture represents the current stance of county and district council policy and that securing the protection of this site for Green Belt purposes in the future has been a long standing priority for both authorities.”
As the deeds say the land should be held as Green Belt there could be strong argument about statutory rights overriding any sale – and whether HCC looked deeply enough into this.
A landmark judgment in Shropshire last March saw the Supreme Court ruling in favour of a resident who
claimed a statutory trust created in 1926 gives residents rights of recreation over a piece of land even after Shrewsbury Town Council sold it to a developer.
As a result, planning permission for a housing development quashed. The ruling is considered to be of major importance to local authorities and their approach to selling off land that has been protected by means of a statutory trust.
Does this ruling mean the same applies to the Radlett airfield site – that it should be maintained as open space for the benefit of the community?
There also remains a lack of transparency over the price agreed for the land and whether HCC has failed in its fiduciary duty, not only over the value of the land vs the price paid, but also by entering into agreements which will place unnecessary financial burdens on taxpayers, such as unfunded infrastructure improvements like the A414, Park Street and London Colney roundabouts.
But while there remains a degree of optimism moving forwards, although HCC has shown itself to be incompetent and inert, ignoring legal advice, ignoring evidence, ignoring residents and blocking petitions, being incompetent is not same as acting illegally.
One of the leaders of Fight the Freight, Terrie Smith, said this week: “The more we look into this, the more we discover what we believe to be serious governance weaknesses around Herts CC’s decision to sell. There are precedents of judges overturning the sale of land by local authorities. We continue to fight and continue to campaign.”
