Update on Council’s Decision to cut Lease short
Please write to the Council if you object to the lack of consultation and the termination of our lease.
Council’s Response to Freedom of Information Request and General Update
We received a response from the Council to our request for information dated 12 September 2024. We asked for written materials and communications between the Council and Dose of Nature since we were told in May 2023 by the Council that it had no grounds to terminate our lease early.
The response was lost in the post and finally reached us on 30 October 2024. We are prohibited from publishing the response without consent but here is a summary of what it revealed:
The Chair of Dose of Nature, Sir Mark Rowley, met with the Leader, Gareth Roberts, in the first week of March 2024 when he agreed to transfer the lease to Dose of Nature.
There are apparently no notes of this meeting held by the Council.
In an email dated 14 March 2024, Sir Mark asked the the Council when the Trustees were to be told. We were finally told on 5 September 2024 and notice of termination was served around 20 September 2024.
We do not understand how the Leader can say that he could not consult because there was a risk of Dose of Nature leaving the Borough when the Council sat on its hands for 6 months after agreeing with Dose of Nature to terminate the lease.
We also do not understand how the Council can say that consultation would have made no difference - Gareth Roberts has said in correspondence copied to us on 8 November in an email to one of our supporters that consultation would just have been “Would you like more of the same?” Well given that, on 5 September when they finally got round to telling us, the Council had no idea how nurseries, schools and local residents used the field or about our programme of talks, we just wonder how this phrase could have been used earlier? Put simply, the Council did not know anything about the situation on the ground when they sat down and agreed the future of Pensford Field in March 2024. The Council then made no efforts to verify the facts in the following 6 months or to apply any principles of local democracy, including consultation as they pledged to do in their Compact with the voluntary sector.
We have now made further Freedom of Information Requests for emails between officials in the period between March and September 2024 and for any written evidence supporting some of the erroneous statements made in this Council report.
We have not yet had a response to the Complaint we made on 16 October - the Council has 20 working days to respond which was up on 14 November. If the response is not satisfactory, we will refer to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.
We are meeting with the Leader and Dose of Nature on 29 November 2024 with Kew Society in attendance and we will keep you posted.
Please do continue writing to the Council if you consider the lack of consultation and/or the decision is wrong. We have been so touched by some of the letters received. A list of relevant email addresses can be found at the end of this previous post.
