A council rarely gives up a sports facility because it looks neglected. It needs evidence that nobody is going without. The application supplied it, and the council's planning policy team accepted the case: neither a replacement green nor a compensation payment was needed. Biodiversity was handled separately, through a contribution secured by legal agreement.
The full story
The policy was plain. Sports facilities were protected from development unless a proper assessment showed they were surplus, and it made no difference how long the gates had been shut. So the application could not lean on the state of the site. It had to deal with need.
Our Design and Access Statement set out why the green could not simply reopen. It had shared its facilities with the pub next door. When the pub was converted and houses were built on the land that served the club, the green lost them, and putting new ones on the green itself would leave too little of it to play on.
Working with our client's planning consultant, the application then measured demand. It took a two kilometre catchment, counted about 40,000 people on the Birmingham side of it, applied the participation rate for crown green bowls and compared the result with what was already there: four clubs inside the Birmingham part of the catchment, none of them full. The method was one the council and a planning inspector had accepted on another Birmingham site. On open space, the 0.2 hectares to be lost was set against about 141 hectares within the same two kilometres.
The council's leisure team first asked for a standard compensation payment of £75,000 for the lost green. Its formal response, in June 2023, accepted that the green was suitable for development. The objection was to losing a sports facility without a payment.
When the council asked for a statement on the loss in July, the reply went back within a day. It set out what the policy actually asked for, a replacement only where a need had been shown, and pointed to a 2021 appeal on another Birmingham bowling green (APP/P4605/W/20/3255763), where the inspector had given a payment of the same kind no weight.
In August 2023 the council's planning policy team tested the assessment against the council's own most recent evidence and accepted it. The policy was met and, in the council's words, "in this particular case, replacement facilities or an equivalent financial contribution is not appropriate."
The design moved with the council's comments. Before the application was made, its planning and highways officers agreed the plots and the access, including a six metre shared drive to the two homes at the back. During the application, its urban design team asked for chimneys on the three pairs facing the street and for brick walls where gardens meet the new drive, and a leftover strip along the western boundary went into the rear gardens. The council's report found that the amended plans would enhance the public realm.
Biodiversity was a separate question. Under the biodiversity metric, most of the site's habitat value came from its trees, many of them self-set on the green after it closed, and eight homes with gardens could not replace that on so small a site. The council's ecologist asked for a payment towards habitat elsewhere. We made the case that the first figure would make the scheme unviable, and the sum was reduced before it was secured by legal agreement, with a monitoring fee on top.
The officer recommended approval in February 2024, and the permission was issued on 22 October 2024, once the legal agreement had been signed. It came with 24 conditions, covering materials, landscaping, boundaries, drainage, levels and ecology. A draft condition asking for an earthworks scheme before any work could start was left out after we pointed out that the site was flat. The new footway crossings, and two new street trees in place of the one removed, were left to a separate highways agreement.
