Date set for Ashton Gate Sporting Quarter homes legal challenge

The legal impasse that has stopped bosses at Bristol’s biggest events venue from starting work on a new arena and sporting quarter could soon be sorted - after a date was finally announced for the case to be heard in court.

Waste firm ETM lodged a Judicial Review against Bristol City Council last September claiming council planners shouldn’t have given planning approval for 510 new homes to be built on a field in Ashton Vale behind their waste treatment works in South Bristol. Now, nine months later, their case against the council will finally be heard in a court, with a date of July 11 scheduled for the initial hearing in London.

The judicial review challenge stopped the sale of the development land owned by Bristol Sport owner Steve Lansdown, and the knock-on effect prevented work from starting on the Ashton Gate Sporting Quarter, that is set to create a new basketball arena and conference centre, hotel, car park, more than 100 new homes and an office complex next to existing stadium. In October last year, Ashton Gate even warned the entire project could be scrapped if the legal issues were not solved soon.

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The chairman of Ashton Gate, Martin Griffiths, said the judicial review had ‘blocked’ progress on starting the Sporting Quarter development, and they should be well on their way to completing the first stages by now.

Mr Griffiths said that the recent concert season at Ashton Gate - which saw around 100,000 people fill Ashton Gate for four events featuring huge music names - showed the massive boost to the city’s economy from major events - something which could be a year-round thing once the Ashton Gate Arena is completed.

“The concert season is a short one as the sporting calendar quite rightly takes precedence, but these large-scale music events add a lot to the city,” Mr Griffiths said. “We had hoped to have our Ashton Gate Arena within the new Sporting Quarter well underway by now but the Judicial Review lodged by ETM last October has blocked our progress.

“This lack of an arena denies the local economy the benefit of hundreds of jobs alongside a permanent financial boost to citywide hospitality businesses, to say nothing of the millions of pounds that would flow into the council from business rates, council tax and CIL levies,” he added.

The huge boost to the local economy from the big Take That, Kings of Leon and BS3Live events saw some bars and restaurants nearby report a 1,000 per cent spike in business, and the hotel industry in Bristol reported that they were completely full on the nights of the big concerts.

“More needs to be done to speed up the delivery of these venues,” said Raphael Herzog, the chair of the Bristol Hoteliers Association. “This city lacks big events and needs more facilities to host them all-year round.

“While we applaud what Ashton Gate is doing, and the positive benefits they have brought to our businesses, there is a lot more that can be done, not least of which is to complete both arenas planned for our city,” he added.

Mark Kelly, the CEO of Ashton Gate Stadium, said the four concerts this year were a huge boost to the local economy. “It’s been a monumental effort from our stadium team to deliver another successful concert series – not just for the stadium but for the city as a whole,” he said.

“Off the back of a hugely busy sporting season in which we held 69 football and rugby matches, it was incredible to see the stadium host the double-header of Take That followed by our own BS3 Festival and Kings of Leon.

“The four concerts attracted nearly a hundred thousand fans and the impact on the city’s hotels, restaurants, pubs and bars is enormous. Hotels in the city were at capacity on both Saturday nights of the concert weekends, and some local businesses have told me, anecdotally, that their revenues spiked by more than a thousand per cent compared with a ‘normal’ weekend.

Read more: The story of the block on the Ashton Gate Sporting Quarter

• Sep 2023 - Ashton Gate Sporting Quarter and Longmoor Village projects finally get planning permission

• Sep 2023 - Ashton Gate Sporting Quarter on hold as waste firm takes council planners to court

• Oct 2023 - Ashton Gate Sporting Quarter: Council tells waste firm 'see you in court' in row over noise

• Oct 2023 - Sporting Quarter development could be 'abandoned' warn Ashton Gate as legal action looms

“To have this kind of positive impact on the wider economy is something that we’re all proud of and adds weight to the argument that Bristol needs more capacity to drive the visitor economy,” he added.

Work to create the Ashton Gate Arena and the wider Sporting Quarter development is yet to start, and should have got underway last autumn. Ashton Gate linked the Sporting Quarter planning application to a second one submitted as part of the project, to build 510 new homes a few hundred yards away on a large field next to Ashton Vale, with a development called Longmoor Village.

Ashton Gate said some of the costs of creating the Sporting Quarter development at the stadium would be funded from the sale of the land, once planning permission was obtained to develop it into houses. However, in October last year, just after council planners signed off on the permissions, but just before the sale could go through, a local waste firm started a legal challenge against the council for giving planning permission.

ETM - who at the time named both Ashton Gate Stadium and Bristol City Council as two of its biggest customers - challenged the planning permission. The firm claimed that the council had not taken into account the impact on its business.

ETM’s case, which will now finally be heard by a judge on July 11, is that residents of the new houses built in the Longmoor Village development will be near enough to ETM’s waste processing facility to be able to legally complain about the noise from their yard, and could therefore potentially damage their business.

ETM are understood to want Mr Lansdown and Ashton Gate to fund a cover over their yard - which could cost as much as £1 million - but Ashton Gate has refused.

Bristol City Council said it was confident not only in the way it assessed the concerns around noise and impact of ETM on the proposed new houses, but also that ETM’s claims were groundless, and that the people living in the homes nearest the ETM waste yard were far enough away for the noise of it not to breach legal limits - as long as ETM stuck to the limits spelled out in its own planning permissions.

Bosses at Ashton Gate are understood to be hopeful that a court hearing will see the legal challenge between ETM and Bristol City Council dealt with swiftly, so they can get started on the Sporting Quarter as soon as possible.