Costain legal row over but the wait goes on for answers

The £600,000 settlement figure includes confidentiality clause which prevents parties going into details about case

IT WAS a bitter five-year legal row which resulted in at least two resignations, an employment tribunal and more than £150,000 of taxpayers’ money being spent – but Newbury Town Council’s dispute with Parkway developer Costain is finally over.

Costain has agreed to pay the council £600,000 but stopped short of admitting any liability for subsidence damage caused to Victoria Park.

However, more details of the fiasco are unlikely to be made public – as the settlement agreement contains a confidentiality clause signed by both parties.

Newbury Town Council said it took the decision to settle after being advised that any High Court action could have resulted in “considerably more money” being spent on legal fees and another two years of delays.

Cracks and subsidence in the park and surrounding area appeared shortly after Costain conducted water extraction works when building the Parkway shopping centre’s underground car park in 2010.

The cracks damaged sporting facilities in the park, including Newbury’s historic bowls club lawns, while residents complained of damage in their homes and Victoria Park Nursery School was also affected.

Newbury Town Council’s chief executive, Hugh Peacocke, said: “If we had not settled out of court we were advised it would have taken another two years, have cost us another couple of hundred thousand in legal fees and even if we won we may only have been able to recover up to 75 per cent of our fees.

“It has been a long time coming and we are all very pleased with the end result.

“We will now be able to sort out the park and get it back to the standard it should be. We will be spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on the park. We cannot say exactly how much until we sort everything and it goes out to tender."

The town council launched legal proceedings shortly after the damage first appeared and the ongoing dispute has racked up costs in excess of £150,000 for the authority – including more than £100,000 spent on legal fees and £40,000 on professional reports and a hydrogeological survey.

When asked whether the £600,000 figure was more or less than the figure the council was asking for, Mr Peacocke added: “We achieved more than we were looking to so we're happy.”