Is it necessary to lease the land?

 

The Farnham Park Sports Fields Charitable Trust was established on an unusual legal footing.

The 1971 Act does not merely permit the Council to manage the land. It states:

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“The Council shall maintain and manage the land.”

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That duty was deliberately placed on the Council when the Trust was created.

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The original arrangement

 

Under this statutory model, the Trustee holds the land for its charitable purpose, while the Council is responsible for maintaining and managing it.

If the land is not being managed or maintained to a reasonable standard, the natural question for the Trustee should therefore be:

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Is the Council properly fulfilling the duty Parliament assigned to it?

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The Council’s own financial pressures do not, by themselves, remove that statutory responsibility.

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Why was a lease pursued?

 

In July 2024, Buckinghamshire Council’s Cabinet, acting as sole corporate trustee, decided to market the golf course and playing fields for a long-term lease. The reason recorded was that the existing in-house management arrangements were considered financially unsustainable. The later decision report explains that the proposed lease would reduce maintenance costs and ensure that the Council would no longer need to provide financial support to the Trust.

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This shows that the decision to seek a lease arose directly from the Council’s desire to reduce its own expenditure.

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That creates an important governance question.

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Two roles, two interests

 

Buckinghamshire Council occupies two distinct roles:

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As the local authority, it is subject to the statutory duty to maintain and manage the land.

As Trustee, it must exercise its powers in the best interests of the Charity and its beneficiaries.

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Those interests are not necessarily identical.

 

The local authority may wish to reduce expenditure. An independent trustee, however, might be expected first to ask whether the authority was continuing to fulfil its statutory obligation, rather than adapting the Charity’s arrangements to accommodate the authority’s financial position.

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Delegating management

 

A lease can transfer day-to-day management to another organisation. That does not necessarily mean that the Council’s underlying statutory responsibility disappears.

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The important distinction is between:

• delegating the performance of management duties; and

• being released from legal responsibility for them.

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Whether a long-term lease is compatible with the Council’s continuing statutory role will depend on the terms eventually agreed, including the control, monitoring, enforcement and termination rights retained by the Trustee.

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The central question

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The issue is not whether leasing land is always inappropriate.

It is whether a long-term lease was necessary when Parliament had already created a structure under which the Council itself was required to maintain and manage the land.

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Before replacing that arrangement for up to 75 years, the Trustee should be able to explain why leasing offers the Charity and its beneficiaries a better and more secure outcome than continuing to rely on the statutory duty already imposed on the Council.