Members of conservation group Friends Of Becky Addy Wood [FROBAW]) who raised two thirds of the funds to buy 10 acres of Ancient TPO Woodland to protect its rare biodiversity are now faced with crippling legal costs after losing their high court battle with Bradford on Avon town council in Wiltshire over the council’s felling plans for the woodland.
FROBAW members have managed to raise 50% of the awarded costs of over £200,000 themselves, but we are now struggling to raise the rest. We’ve already paid £140,000 to our lawyers and face a further bill from them of over £50,000 and now, with life savings decimated and for some the threat of re-mortgaging homes, we are desperately appealing for help.
The council selected one of the most expensive firms in the South West - Womble Bond Dickinson of Post Office Scandal fame - to represent them and so incurred a massive legal bill. They now seek to recover these costs from a few residents who formally backed the action to try to secure justice for the 140 FROBAW members who contributed £30,000 to the purchase of the wood, believing that they would have a meaningful say in its management. It took a four-day trial in the High Court to get the council to acknowledge that.
FROBAW did not take legal action lightly. From October 2021, we fought for sixteen months to persuade the council to re-consider its felling plans which were based on a disastrously flawed risk-assessment, greatly over-estimating the risk to the public from the trees. (Please see Background information below.) The council refused to even discuss their felling proposal. Finally, reluctantly FROBAW decided the only way to save their precious Ancient Woodland from the needless felling was to take legal action. And in 2023 we won a High Court injunction to prevent “unnecessary destruction” of this historic woodland - which provides increasingly rare, irreplaceable habitat to endangered species of wildlife and plants.
We were then advised that, having paid two thirds of the purchase price for the wood, we had a compelling case that the council held the wood on trust for themselves and FROBAW jointly. That argument was rejected by the Judge but he did uphold the legally binding nature of the Agreement (MoU) signed in 2020 when FROBAW made their contribution, without which the council would not have purchased the wood. After taking FROBAW’s money, the council arrogantly tried to say, right up to the door of the Court, that the signed Agreement was too vague to be enforceable. They behaved aggressively throughout the case, dismissing the valid concerns that we raised and they refused to even meet to talk throughout most of the time this action took to come to trial.
To add to FROBAW’s sense of injustice, we tried on many occasions to settle the case with the council, including an offer to go to mediation in August 2023, eight months before the trial. The judge criticised the council in court for not taking up this offer but still ruled that the community group must pay the council’s costs.
The proof that FROBAW was right to fight this case is that the council in court acknowledged the catastrophic error of their woodland risk assessment and have now been forced to set up a permanent Liaison Committee to try to hold them to account for the way in which they deal with the wood.
Yet the legal costs are eye watering. It seems that this is once again a case of money and power overcoming common sense and justice.
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Further background points
• FROBAW contributed £30,000 of the £45,000 sale price of Becky Addy Wood in 2020. The council stumped up a mere £7,000 yet still refused to take FROBAW’s well-researched concerns about their felling plans seriously.
• The council catastrophically over-estimated the risk to the public from the Ancient Woodland trees. They estimated the footfall on the small woodland footpath to be 192 - 1728 people per day - as though it were a busy urban street! FROBAW had established the correct figure to be 43-46 people per day in two actual footfall count surveys, both of which were ignored by the council.
• The council’s footfall estimate led their tree surveyor to condemn 152 trees for felling or severe lopping. FROBAW’s tree consultant Ian Monger used VALID Tree Risk Assessment - a system devised by a Professor of Risk Assessment at Bristol University - and input the correct footfall, concluding that no more than three trees needed work.
• A senior Natural England advisor was so impressed with Ian Monger’s work that he sent his reports and the VALID system to the senior regional NE manager who in turn cascaded the information to DEFRA.
• The council refused to acknowledge the validity of any of the above until the case came to trial in May 2024. In court an email was read out from expert witness and founder of the QTRA tree risk assessment system, Mike Ellison, confirming that the council had wrongly assessed the path (using the same QTRA system) as though it were a moderately busy to busy urban street! Finally, the council agreed they would take this into consideration and the Becky Addy Wood footpath was re-assessed as “low use”.
• Consequently around 40 irreplaceable Ancient and Veteran trees, which provide increasingly rare and vital habitat to endangered species of wildlife and plants, were destroyed unnecessarily.
• If the council had agreed to discuss their tree risk assessment with FROBAW and our consultants, FROBAW would not have needed to take out the High Court Injunction, and this hugely costly dispute - in terms of the environment, money, stress and human distress, could have been avoided.