Following a Councillor Call for Action raised by Councillor Pountney at the previous meeting, the Board considered a briefing note which had been prepared on the recent transfer of part of Torre Valley North Playing Field to Cockington Primary School.

The Board had before it a briefing note which had been prepared by the Director of Children’s Services which answered the Board’s questions and set out the background to the proposal.  It gave a chronology of events and further details about each stage of the transfer of land between the two Council departments.

It was noted that:

·         The Council has a statutory responsibility to provide school places.  However, there is no duty placed on individual schools to expand to take account of the need for school places.  Given the school system is becoming more diverse, the process of providing enough school places is more challenging and is one of agreement and consensus.

·         The birth rate in Torquay is rising but many of the school sites in Torquay are very restricted.

·         Following consultation, a £3.5 million capital project is planned at Cockington Primary School to provide an additional 210 school places for the central Torquay/Chelston area.  A very substantial amount of the school’s current hard play area will be taken by the new school extension.

·         In order to provide additional play space, it was proposed to transfer part of Torre Valley North Playing Field to Cockington Primary School.  Residents and Visitor Services informed sports clubs of the transfer of land and Sport England were consulted.  A planning application was submitted and approved for the new playground and work began in May 2013.

·         At this stage, concerns were raised about the implications to the Cricket and Rugby Clubs of the reduction in size of Torre Valley North Playing Field.  The contractors were instructed to cease all work until further notice at the end of June 2013.

The Chairman of the Board read out a note from the Monitoring Officer which gave his view that he did not consider that what had occurred was sufficient to give rise to a successful claim for maladministration by the Cricket Club against the Council.

The Executive Lead for Children, Schools and Families attended the meeting and stated that he was comfortable that the correct process had been followed but accepted that communication between departments and with councillors could have been better.  The Director of Children’s Services also stated that lessons had been learnt and that the processes for the current proposals at Roselands Primary School had been changed.

The Board raised questions about impact of the transfer on the status of Torre Valley North as a Queen Elizabeth Jubilee Field, the possible discrepancies in the size of the strip of land to be transferred and the policy of incrementally increasing the size of schools rather than building a new school.  The Board was satisfied with all of the answers it received to these questions.

There remained, however, queries about the planning process in that members asserted that all planning applications relating to Council-owned land had always previously been considered by the Development Management Committee (or its predecessors).  Whilst information about how the planning application had been considered was provided in the briefing note, the Board requested that further clarification on this issue be sought from the Executive Head – Spatial Planning.