HoLCG Take Court Action

As you might have seen or heard last week the HoLCG filed a statutory challenge with the High Court on B&NES’s decision to make the Winifred's Lane ETRO permanent. You can read the HoLCG press release here.

There was an article online with the Sunday Telegraph on May 16th which can be found via the link below and we are expecting plenty of local media coverage. See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/8d0d53ce1de95dcf

We had amazing support last time, raising around £40,000, and when we won that round we had a proportion of our legal fees paid by BANES.

A brief summary of finances is below:

•  Our total funds amounted to those raised, £40,000, and costs received from B&NES, £36,000, totalling £76,000. 

• Our legal fees to challenge the first ETRO cost us around £53,000, leaving us around £22,000.

• We have invested these remaining funds on legal advice preparing a challenge to the (second) ETRO, on commissioning a traffic consultancy report, on the costs of setting up and maintaining our website, and on the initial costs of preparing this latest challenge to the TRO making the ETRO permanent.

We are now aiming to raise a minimum of £20,000 to cover the legal costs of getting us to, and taking part in, a full day hearing in the High Court in about 6 months. If we win, we will again receive a proportion of our fees from the council which, unless you object, we will distribute to local charities via a poll of donors.

So, we need to ask for your support again. This is the last time we will ask. If we lose now then it is over but if we win B&NES will be legally forced to remove all restrictions on Winifred’s Lane, they can’t just move the goalposts again. 

 If you donated last time pledging what you did last time would be amazing, or if you can only give 75% or even 50% of what you gave before that would be an enormous help. If you have not donated before whatever you can pledge this time would be wonderful.

To donate go to https://www.gofundme.com/f/heartoflansdown.

There has been a huge amount of work in the background by the HOLCG volunteers who have all given their time for free since we were last in touch, please help us this one last time if you can. Thank you.

 Don't forget to log WL area traffic incidents in our incident log at https://www.heartoflansdown.co.uk/incidents. A good log will hep our court case.