UKC

Thought this long delayed win would interest some here:

https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/lawsuits-locals-land-derby...

Exceptionally long time - and good on them.   I wonder how much money the barrister cost the land owner??

Like the Midhope moor plastic track situation or the better known wild camping landowner appeals on Dartmor I guess the legal investment buys time even if they lose.

https://www.cprepdsy.org.uk/news/1/

With Dartmoor, the current situation is that wild camping is allowed, following the appeal court's decision and pending the final decision by the supreme court.

Sorry Mark... you're right that it doesn't apply in that case. Time and time again it does though. Outside of access this also includes: the degradation of water quality by water companies and farmers; moorland estate raptor persecution and enviromentally destructive heather burns; landowner abuse of quarry regulation; and I'm sure other could list more examples. Then we have all the well funded lobbying against legal change or to reverse legal positions (which would include Dartmoor wild camping). The outcomes of the system do seem stacked against acting on evidence based breaches of defined policy and legal acknowledgement and recompense is too often incredibly slow.

You might know, but there was a cut off date - 2026, after which there would be no more registrations of PROWs.  ||This has now been altered:=

https://www.hcrlaw.com/news-and-insights/the-new-2031-cut-off-date-for-hist...

Most PROW teams across the country have many such applications to amend the Definitive Map waiting to be processed that have been sitting there on file for similar lengths of time (and longer!) with not enough staff to deal with them. It's actually relatively rare for an application based on user evidence (as opposed to historic documentary evidence) to be picked up and dealt with that is over 10 years old because 10 year old user/witness evidence can be unreliable, and many of those who submitted evidence for the original application will have passed away/moved away/lost interest 10 years down the line so there is no longer much evidence to examine

Now totally scrapped:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy89yddgg7yo
Deadline to record forgotten footpaths to be scrapped

Now totally *to be* scrapped. I’ll believe it when I see it, and once the Tories are back in power you’d imagine they’d reinstate it.

jcm

I wonder whether the relevant authorities have powers to order the path remain open pending an appeal. If they don’t, why not? And if they do, why didn’t they use them? And, while I’m asking questions, given that the effect of the inspector’s findings is that this way became a public footpath some time before 2003, why is the landowner not liable in damages to members of the public for blocking it up, and/or being prosecuted?

jcm

The late witnesses made witness statements, presumably. Those would be admissible in an ordinary civil court so long as proper notice was given under the Civil Evidence Act.  Are they not admissible in this kind of proceedings, I wonder? You’d think they should be.

jcm

They are, it's just that the witness statement of an 90 year old who used the path between the ages of 40 and 60 is not as good evidence as a witness statement from a 50 year old who used the path for 20 years up until last month

The answer to both questions is no because an unrecorded path is not proven to be public until the DMMO has been confirmed 

I'm reasonably confident that the present government will get around to this in the next 4.5 years. What would be even better would be for them to fund the processing of the huge backlog of DMMO applications as well. Incidentally, it was actually the last Labour government that introduced the deadline, it was part of the CROW Act 2000.

It's hard enough to get a blocked public footpath reopened, never mind an unrecorded path.

Sure (about witness credibility). It shouldn’t be as true as it is imho, but true it is.

if you block a private right of way which had been acquired by prescription, you are liable from the moment you block it, not from the moment the court declares that the right exists. Why should the law be different with a public right? I’m sure it is different as you say, but why should that be the policy?

(I mean, I know what a defender of the status quo would say; liability to an indeterminate and infinite class of persons is wrong, and people ought to be able to tell for sure when they are committing criminal offences. But it feels as though the law should be able to impose some sanction in these sort of outrageous circumstances.)

And similarly in such a dispute over a claimed private right the court will decide whether to keep the way open pending the outcome or not according to the balance of convenience, assuming a reasonable prima facie case is shown. Why not here? (again, as a matter of policy, not the existing law).

If I remember the deadline was a quid pro quote in the CRoW Act to help pacify landowners, but yes.

jcm

Good questions, and I don't know the answers.

My gut feeling is that a private right of way being unusable causes more inconvenience than a public right of way being unusable. Even if there are two or even three ways to access private property, having one of them physically obstructed would be a right pain. Whereas there is almost always an alternative method of getting from A to B on the public highway network.

Well, yes, there’s that. And then there’s the fact that our legislative body contains a disproportionate number of landowners.

jcm

Without wishing to be pedantic, it is a long time, a very long time, but maybe not exceptionally. The landowner is motivated to just drag it out in the hope the complainant will move house, lose interest or die, all the while having what they want, no one on the path.

IMHO, this is one reason landowners get away with bad behaviour around PROWs, if anyone complains, it all takes so long.

Bravo to Susan Simpson.

The biggest delay in the DMMO process is the council getting round to assessing the application and then making the order if there is enough evidence to do so. The second biggest bottleneck is central government's planning inspectorate getting round to make the final decision if the council's order attracts objections (and it almost always does). The landowner doesn't have to do anything other than make an objection to ensure the process gets dragged out over several years.