| SPOTLIGHT |
A High Court judge has quashed a Welsh council’s decision to close a village school and merge it with a nearby primary school.
Bridgend County Borough Council decided on 29 April 2014 to shut Tyn yr Heol School in the village of Llangeinor and merge it with another school, Betws Primary School, on a single site to be shared also with a Welsh-medium school, YGG Cwm Garw.
The decision was taken as part of Bridgend's School Modernisation Programme, which is intended to ensure that schools in Bridgend and its environs are fit for the 21st century.
The claimant, Ceri McCann, was a member of the Tyn yr Heol Action Group, a campaign group set up to oppose the closure of the school.
McCann lives in Llangeinor and she and her parents and siblings and children have all attended the school, which she described to the court as the heart of the village.
The claimant challenged Bridgend’s decision on the ground that the council failed in material respects to comply with the requirements of the statutory decision-making process that has applied to such decisions in Wales since October 2013.
In McCann, R (On the Application Of) v Bridgend County Borough Council [2014] EWHC 4335 His Honour Judge Keyser QC, sitting as a Judge of the High Court at the Cardiff Civil Justice Centre, found in favour of the claimant.
The judge stressed that he was not concerned with the merits of Bridgend’s proposal.
However, he concluded that Bridgend had in a number of material respects failed to comply with the requirements of the School Standards and Organisation (Wales) Act 2013 and the School Organisation Code (issued in July 2013).
“Taken together, those failures can, in my view, be seen to be both a cause of an inadequate approach to the decision-making process and symptomatic of a failure to engage with the ethos of the statutory provisions,” HHJ Keyser said.
The judge added that at the heart of the procedure laid down by the Act and the Code was an emphasis on public participation in particular decisions that affected the life of any community.
“It seems to me that the statutory procedure reflects the attribution of an inherent value to public participation in a democratic society,” he said.
HHJ Keyser said it was clear that the council had failed to set out in its consultation document the alternatives that had been considered and the reasons why they had been discounted.
“The defendant's argument at the hearing of this claim boiled down to saying that the alternatives had not been realistic or viable and therefore did not have to be identified in the consultation,” he noted.
“In my judgment, whether or not that would be a sufficient answer in respect of consultations carried out pursuant to a common law duty or some other statutory procedure, it is not a sufficient answer under the 2013 Act and the Code. The simple requirement is to give details of ‘any alternatives’ that have been considered. The defendant's approach to this question seems to me to be fundamentally flawed.”
The judge said that the council had during the statutory process simply claimed that its proposal was the best option, “apparently because its officers had reached that conclusion”. That was not what the statutory process required, and it undermined the clear purposes inherent in that process.
HHJ Keyser said he also regarded another ground of challenge – a failure to notify the regional Assembly Members – as one on which the decision ought property to be quashed.
