Crown Court quash caravan park licence conviction in Wyldecrest Park Management v. Bristol City Council.

Reporting on the case, Bristol Live said that the Crown Court found the city council first refused to issue a new licence to the company and then, according to the report, prosecuted the company for not having a licence.

The background to the case, as reported, began in April 2021 when Wyldecrest, which runs more than 100 caravan parks across the UK, bought the lease to manage Riverside Drive, a small caravan park in Frenchay, on the south side of the River Frome, just inside Bristol’s city boundary.

Wyldecrest applied for a new licence to run the caravan park in Wyldecrest’s name, rather than the former owner’s name.

The council eventually responded, saying they couldn’t issue a licence because the caravan park did not appear to have planning permission, and later said the previous licence, which had been issued back in 1983, had been issued in error.

Mr Sunderland asked the council to search for the planning history to show the park did have the right permissions from more than 60 years ago, but the council said there was no evidence of this. The council eventually started a prosecution.

Mr Sunderland told Bristol Live that the council acting as the planning authority and the licensing authority effectively created a ‘judge and jury situation’, and Wyldecrest were in an impossible position because it couldn't get a licence without planning permission and the council was the only one with the information on whether the site had planning permission in the first place.

Magistrates in Bristol in February 2023 heard the council claim Wyldecrest had not been able to prove it had planning permission, and "were told by council officers the council itself had done nothing wrong". Wyldecrest was ordered to pay an £8,000 fine, and ordered to pay £25,000 council costs.

Wyldecrest appealed to the crown court in Bristol.

It is reported that Recorder Zeb "was scathing in her judgement about what the council had done. She quashed the conviction and ordered the council to pay Wyldecrest’s costs. More than that, though, the recorder found the council had been guilty of abuse of process, twice - once for deciding to prosecute Wyldecrest for not having a licence in the first place, when the company had asked for, and not received the information it needed to get a licence in the first place, and for making an offer to the company to stop the prosecution in return for money."

The Report continued:

"The recorder criticised the council for failing to find the information before the prosecution, and failing to properly explain why to the court. "We find all of the potential rationale given by BCC as to why they did not grant a licence to be flawed and to result entirely from their own flawed record keeping system and/or their own officers failing to conduct proper searches that would have alerted them to the existence of the planning permission that was in place," she said.

"Recorder Zeb’s judgement added: “In our judgement the decision to prosecute in June 2022 did amount to an abuse of process and furthermore it is our judgement that a continuation of this prosecution particularly after August 2022 also marked a continuing abuse of process.”"