Save the Epping Forest Act |
Epping Forest is natural land in the east of London as far as the orbital motorway (M25) from about half way out from the centre of the metropolis.
Nick Herbert, the Policing Minister, wants to use the notorious Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 to tear up the Epping Forest Act 1878. This is to allow the Metropolitan Police to build a base on Wanstead Flats (the southernmost part of Epping Forest) during the Olympic Games. There will be 2500 officers, 375 vehicles, 54 horses and some dogs, presenting an obvious terrorist target just 50m away from the nearest houses.
The whole of the case against these proposals is available as a single PDF document or as a PostScript A5 booklet (for which you need a two-sided printer and a long-arm stapler).
We are preparing a petition to the House of Lords that has to be delivered there on Monday 4 April.
This 2006 Act gave any Minister the power to rewrite more or less any piece of primary legislation, so it was described in the national press at the time as the “Bill to end all Bills” and the “abolition of Parliament”.
Legislation should be made on the basis of proper parliamentary scrutiny, not by ministers for reasons of expediency. When the Coalition Goverment took power in May 2010, they promissed to sweep away anti-democratic laws like this that the Labour Government introduced in its later, increasingly authoritarian, years. Nick Herbert and the rest of his party opposed this Act in 2006, when they were in Opposition.
The purported purpose of this Act was to “remove regulatory burdens”. A programmer would call this “bug fixing”, but of course such methods only encourage shoddy drafting. It has in fact been used about 20 times to do this kind of thing. However, this is the first time, so far as I can gather, when it has been used to rip up an entire Act of Parliament.
See here for details of how the Act functions and the uses that have been made of it in the past. See here for the opposition that there was to it inside and outside Parliament in 2006.
The 1878 Act put the Corporation of the City of London in charge of Epping Forest as Conservators. The Act did not mince its words when it specified their responsibilities: Section 7 says
- Subject to the provisions of this Act, the Conservators shall at all times keep Epping Forest uninclosed and unbuilt on, as and open space for the recreation and enjoyment of the public; and they shall by all lawful means prevent, resist, and abate all future inclosures, encroachments, and buildings, and all attempts to inclose, encroach, or build on any part thereof, or to appropriate or use the same, or the soil, timber, or road thereof, or any part thereof, for any purpose inconsistent with the objects of this Act.
- Subject to the provisions of this Act, the Conservators shall not sell, demise, or otherwise alienate any part of the Forest, or concur in any sale, demise or other alienation therefor, or of any part thereof.
The Act is not available online in full, but here are the relevant parts. Here is some more history of the Act.
East London was subject to major housing development in the 1860s and 1870s, including the houses where many of the campaigners now live.
This may be seen as part the historical process of inclosure that happened in the 18th and 19th centuries, ie when landowners deprived common people of their traditional rights of grazing animals and collecting firewood in order to develop the land for agriculture and housing.
The Epping Forest Act was one of the first pieces of legislation intended to protect open land from further development. That role is even more important in 2011 than it was in 1878.
The Corporation is the “local authority” for the City of London, ie the “Square Mile”, not for the metropolis, so Epping Forest is way outside their territory. However, they owned enough of the land to qualify as Commoners and fought numerous Court battles against landowners for the rights of common people. This is how they came to be appointed Conservators of the Forest and have since undertaken the care of many other open spaces in and around London.
The biggest threat that the Epping Forest Act and Wanstead Flats in particular faced in the past was the proposal to build houses there in 1946 for the people who had been bombed out and were living in tents. Nevertheless local people resisted the building proposals, the Corporation supported the people against the local authority and a public enquiry finally rejected the proposals. There is a history of this campaign by Mark Gorman and a shorter one; an exhibition about it was held in Stratford in 2007–8.
However, the Corporation was utterly supine when the Police came along with their demands for the Olympics.
It seems that no provision was made for Policing in the main planning documents for the huge main site for the Olympic Games that are to be held in London next year.
The Metropolitan Police authority therefore intends to build three “Muster, Briefing and Deployment Centres” (MBDC) outside the main Olympic site. The one for the South East is to be at Blackheath and is under consideration by Lewisham Council. There will be another somewhere in West London, but we don’t know where.
The biggest one is proposed for a part of Wanstead Flats that has come to be known as the Fairground Site. It is about 50m from the nearest houses in Sidney Road.
It is planned to station about 2500 police officers, 375 vehicles, 54 horses and some dogs there.
Since these proposals are illegal under the 1878 Act, the Home Office wishes to use the 2006 Act to amend it.
They published a consultation document on 16 September 2010, but this grossly mispresented the Act and what had to be done to change it. Most of the legal discussion concerned a section of the Act that became obsolete in 1882.
Maybe somebody made the schoolboy error of failing to read what the Act actually said, but if so this was a blunder of a magnitude that should have lost them their job.
The other explanation is that this was a deliberate attempt to mis-lead local people and the organisations that care for Epping Forest in order to avoid a powerful campaign.
The 2006 Act claims that its purpose is to simplify complicated legislation. It is a pot calling the kettle black, because it is written in the most appallingly contrived language. Whilst there are some archaic words in the 1878 Act, there are no “technical” clauses in it.
Section 7 of the Epping Forest Act is essentially all there is to it. The only way of legalising the Police proposals is to change this Section.
See here for the textual analysis demonstrating how the Home Office mis-represented what the Epping Forest Act says, even though the Corporation had already given them correct legal advice. The 2006 Act requires the Minister to go back to square one with his consultation process.
The site lies within 100m of the point the point where the London Boroughs of Redbridge, Newham and Waltham Forest meet. (On this map, these boudaries are purple and the orange arrow indicates the site.)
It will disrupt the lives of thousands of Newham and Waltham Forest residents, but the nearest people in Redbridge are some distance away on the other side of the park. Despite having no electoral mandate or moral authority, Redbridge gets to make the decision because it lies just within their boundaries.
The proposal was first advertised on their planning website on 16 November and eventually rubber-stamped by their Regulatory Committee on Thursday 24 February.
Whilst those dates were three months apart, it was not possible for local people to arrange for professional scrutiny of the documents because
The website is also extremely awkward to use: after following this link, you have to click on “View documents”, then select the document and finally click “View”. There seems to be no way to make Web links direct to individual documents.
There are 150 documents in six pages of listings. Some of the planning documents are on the first page, some on the last. In betweeen these are more than 80 objections from local people and a petition with over 1800 signatures.
The following discussion is based on the personal objections lodged by residents David Bowden, Tot Brill, Alan Cornish, Tim Harris, Kath Lee, Kevin Mansell, Michael Pelling, Paul Taylor, Cilius Victor and a local solicitor. There is also a Save Wanstead Flats campaign website and a Facebook page. Kevin Blowe, the leader of the campaign, has his own blog.
The particular issues that local people raise are as follows:
After they had done so in their site selection document, a local solicitor actually visited them. The selection criteria seem to have been made up to fit the site that had already been chosen, in fact they don’t even fit that very well.
The muster station site is on part of the foraging area of the nearest Skylark population to the centre of London; Skylark is a Red Data List species and is already under tremendous pressure in the area. Restricting the foraging of adults will threaten the food supply (and survival chances) of young Skylarks.
This document was translated from LATEX by HEVEA.