Local authority – Consultation – Community impact assessment – Defendant local authority deciding to close school – Claimant objector applying for judicial review to quash decision –Whether defendants failing to comply with requirements of statutory decision-making process – Application granted
The defendant local authority decided to close Tyn yr Heol School in the village of Llangeinor in Bridgend, South Wales and merge it with another school on a single site to be shared also with a third schoo, as part of the defendants’ School Modernisation Programme (“SMP”), which was intended to ensure that schools in Bridgend and its environs were fit for the twenty-first century. The claimant was a member of an action group set up to oppose the closure of the school. She lived in Llangeinor and she and her parents and siblings and children had all attended the school, which she described as the heart of the village. She applied for judicial review of the defendants’ decision on the ground that they had failed in material respects to comply with the requirements of the statutory decision-making process.
The claimant contended that: (i) the pre-publication consultation document had not complied with the mandatory requirements of s 3.2 of the School Organisation Code, established under the School Standards and Organisation (Wales) Act 2013, in respect of the identification of alternatives to the proposal; (ii) the defendants had failed to develop and consider their proposal in a properly evidence-based way, as required by the code; (iii) the defendants had failed to comply with the Code in respect of either the assessment of the impact of the closure of the school on the community or the production of a community impact assessment (CIA); and (iv) the defendants had failed to provide Regional Assembly members with copies of the consultation document, consultation report, statutory notice and objections report, as required by the code.
Held: The application was granted.
(1) The defendants had clearly failed to set out in the consultation document the alternatives considered and the reasons for discounting them. The contention that the alternatives were not required to be identified in the consultation because they were not realistic or viable was not a sufficient answer under the 2013 Act and the Code, whether or not it would be a sufficient answer in respect of consultations pursuant to a common law duty or some other statutory procedure. The reasons why the alternatives had been rejected should have been stated in the consultation document: R (on the application of Moseley) v Haringey London Borough Council [2014] UKSC 56; [2014] 1 WLR 3947 and R (on the application of Joicey) v Haringey London Borough Council [2014] EWHC 3657) (Admin) [2014] PLSCS 312 considered.
(2) No reason had been given why, in accordance with s 1.3 of the Code, the interests of pupils and the quality of outcomes, provision, and leadership and management should not be treated as the most important consideration or why outcomes and provision for existing pupils should not be, at least, equivalent to those which the school currently afforded. Accordingly, there should normally be evidence that standards in the new school would be, at least, equivalent to those at the present school. The defendants had failed to address that requirement in an adequate manner.
3) The defendants had not provided the CIA with the consultation document, as they should ideally have done. Their failure to make the CIA available to the school’s governing body or the action group in response to their formal objections and requests or enquiries in that regard represented a departure from the requirements of a fair consultation, which had not been displaced by the specific requirements of the statutory procedure.
(4) The complaint alleging failure to notify the Regional Assembly members was also a ground on which the defendants’ decision ought properly to be quashed. The breach had not been cured and the outcome would not inevitably have been the same if the Regional Assembly members had been provided with the information to which they had been entitled.
David Wolfe QC (instructed by Public Law Solicitors, of Birmingham) appeared for the claimant; Wayne Beglan (instructed by Bridgend County Borough Council) appeared for the defendants.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister
Read a transcript of R (on the application of McCann) v Bridgend County Borough Council here
