AN appeal to push through a super-school for Bishop’s Stortford – despite refusal of plans last year – is pending.
Education authority Herts County Council (HCC) has confirmed it is still considering its position on the proposals to relocate the Herts and Essex and Bishop’s Stortford high schools to a joint campus on Green Belt land at Thorley and develop the secondaries’ current sites for new homes.
Speculation has been growing that both schools are about to launch an appeal, backed by council taxpayers’ money from HCC, against East Herts District Council’s refusal of planning permission last September.
However, a County Hall spokeswoman said: “We have not actually made a decision [on whether to back an appeal].”
Rodney Stock, a key figure in the plans as chairman of Bishop’s Stortford High School’s governors, told the Observer: “It [an appeal] would be news to me. Anyone who tells you they are appealing . . . have more knowledge than me.”
Nevertheless, critics of the scheme, principally the town’s civic federation, remain convinced an appeal to a Government inspector is imminent with a four-month inquiry likely, costing hundreds of thousands of public money.
Any hearing would examine evidence from both sides into the six separate planning applications central to the scheme to relocate and expand the schools on farmland off Whittington Way.
The move would be financed by selling off their campuses in Warwick Road and London Road – and the girls’ school’s playing fields in Beldams Lane – for new homes plus the residential redevelopment of HCC’s site at Patmore Close, which was set aside decades ago for a new school.
East Herts rejected the applications on the ground that the educational benefits did not outweigh the damage that would be caused to Stortford’s Green Belt.
Civic federation chairman Richard Hannah said: “It’s outrageous that the schools and the county council are prepared to pursue this lost cause and waste public money when decent hard-working people are having to bear the brunt of cost-saving measures in their daily life.”
