Byway Open to all Traffic through Dean Grove

Mon 3 May 2021, 12:20 (last edited on Mon 3 May 2021, 12:25)

Thank you, Andrew, for raising this again. I hadn't forgotten, but I was waiting to see if others had some better ideas than I have had.

The trouble with the Planning Inspector's Appeal Report is that it accepts that the outcome is not ideal in terms of the habitat, the flora or the environment. So it's only a technical issue that is likely to be relevant.

My earlier thought about cut-off dates for the 2006 Act won't work as this is building on an earlier complaint put in by the Oxford Fieldpaths Society. This was put in by the late Rowland Y. Pomfret, and submitted in 1991.

One thought relating to this is, however, whether the Inspector was right to accept The Oxford Fieldpath Society as a suitable entity to put in an appeal against the 2006 NERC Act. If it was simply being done in the name of Mr Moon, the cut-off date of 2005 might have been relevant -- although it sounds to me as if the Inspector thought there would be a strong case, irrespective of the date of the initial application.

On the Fieldpath Society and its status -- it's clearly a legitimate society for walking etc and has a long and respected history. But I am not sure it's sufficiently formal for it to count as a legal entity -- but I'm not a lawyer, so don't really know. I could  find no AGM minutes for the organisation after 2015, at which time there was no Secretary for West Oxfordshire recorded (post vacant), ditto for Oxford and Vale of White Horse. 

I also noticed that Mr Moon had requested that the missing section should become a Restricted Byway, rather than a BOAT. But I am not clear that Mr Moon could withdraw the application at this stage, even if he decided that he would like to do so. 

The only other thing I can think of is to appeal to the so-called "Sandford Principle" which I have picked up from gleam-uk.org. This states "Where irreconcilable conflicts exist between conservation and public enjoyment in National Parks, then conservation interest should take priority.” Given the the Cotswold ANOB is now a National Landscape & supposed to be more like a National Park, does the principle apply in our area? My suspicion is that it does not. But perhaps others have seen it appealed to.

I don't know if gleam-uk.org could help with this.

I noted Richard's and CPRE's point about a Traffic Regulation Order and, somewhere in the documentation that I read, I also saw that referred to as a possible way forward. However, I can also see from the latest decision recorded on the gleam.uk-org website that TROs can be weak modes of control. If there were a way to get the BOAT classified as a Restricted Byway this would be better.