The latest from Chairman Ben Clasper, from the programme of our Home game against Oxford City Saturday April 9th.

I often tell people that one of the quickest and most important lessons you need to learn if you are responsible for a football club is to prepare to defend it whenever someone in a position to influence its future starts off by telling you how much they love your club or want to see it succeed.

So, the least surprising news of the week is that the person who kicked off their comments in the press about disagreeing with the decision to approve our application by insisting how much their group ‘wants the club to thrive’ is now hoping a judicial review against Southwark Council for how they ran the process for the planning application that will actually allow us to thrive will result in the decision being cancelled.

These are the type of disingenuous people the word ‘but’ was invented for and I would much rather they were honest with everyone that if it comes down to a choice between the club having a future and advancing their own personal agenda they will choose the demise of the club. Every. Single. Time.

We are waiting to see the legal papers lodged this week so we can confirm whether those responsible for the letter before action I told you about in the last programme are named as the claimant for the next legal stage and so sadly I will have to return to this subject in the coming weeks once we understand the impact. I thought it would be useful now though to explain what this process is and what it means so our fans and community are forewarned once this news is made public.

A judicial review is the instrument available to individuals and groups to challenge the way in which a decision is made. The claimant’s legal representatives will need to argue that Southwark Council did not follow the correct procedures during the planning application and planning committee process and a judge will need to agree with those arguments for their claim to succeed. The judge is not interested in whether the decision taken by the planning committee was correct and so it is not a re-running of the planning committee meeting. A successful judicial review can only force a replay not overturn the result.
We have been assured that Southwark Council will contest the claim ‘robustly’ and fight for the result to stand and so I would like to be able to tell you all to wait and trust the process but there is always an element of risk and there is a higher risk of collateral damage to the club from delays or worse. We have been through enough in the past few years to know that uncertainty and insecurity have very real consequences for the club and as those threats have sometimes come from those you would least expect or that you thought would be there to defend us we can take nothing for granted.

I believe the bringing of this claim is an insult to what a judicial review is designed to protect. A judicial review is explicitly not there to give people who want to argue that the decision was incorrect a second bite of the cherry, it is there to protect people from an abuse of power. At the end of the planning committee meeting the individual in question made it clear that they thought the decision to approve was incorrect. That is why I believe this is an abuse of the system, despite having their voice heard over and over again none of the concerns they raised were about whether the council had followed the correct process, had they done so then I would have an ounce of respect for this action. Their complaints after the vote were based solely on disagreeing with the decision taken which is not what a judicial review is intended to defend. Presumably they are seeking a judicial review because it is the only instrument they could find to challenge the decision they disagree with and so we look forward to hearing what arguments can be concocted after the fact.

How worried should we be? This was a lengthy and complex process and so there is a risk that if enough lawyers examine every step, document and statement over the three years it took they can find one technicality on which to have the decision cancelled and sent back to be taken again. It is the legal equivalent of being 5-0 up with a minute to go and the opposition announces they are changing the rules to ‘next goal wins’.
As a calmer man than me once said ‘You've won it once. Now you'll have to go out there and win it again.’