Golfers may not be granted a new lease for L'Ancresse

A working party has recommended a significant hike in the rent that the two golf clubs pay to use what amounts to half of the land, but other options remain.

Jurat Mike Tanguy, who heads the working party, said that neither it nor the Vale Commons Council, to which it has passed on the recommendations, was anti-golf.

'The first point to grasp is that when the present lease ends, after 70 years at a fixed rate of £100 per annum, nobody has the right to require that a new lease be granted to them,' he said.

It has balanced the fact the clubs would have nowhere else to go if golf ended on the commons after 2016, he said.

So it has recommended a 25-year agreement, allowing time to consider alternatives.

'A number of options now present themselves: does the playing of golf end in 2016? If not, should it continue as the preserve of two private members' clubs with, between them, about 1,500 members? Might it, after 70 years, become a municipal course, open to the existing golfers and everyone else, as the States originally decided in the resolution which they passed on 19 March 1947?'