Jo is a Partner in our Commercial Property team.
Jo has 20 years of property experience, and has spent 15 of those working in the education sector.
Jo now supports education clients in all aspects of estate management, acting for a broad range of clients including schools in the maintained sector and FE colleges. This includes advising on landlord and tenant issues; sales and acquisitions; ESFA consents and caretaker's accommodation queries. The higher profile types of work she has dealt with involve complex disposals of school playing field land to housing developers. This is with a view to extracting capital value to invest back into school capital build projects. These projects usually include complex overage and planning issues together with liaising with the Department for Education for consent to sell the land.
The higher profile types of work she has recently dealt with involves complex disposals of school playing field land to housing developers. This is with a view to extracting capital value to invest back into school capital build projects. These projects usually include complex overage and planning issues together with liaising with the Department for Education for consent to sell the land. The sale of playing field land for residential housing is important as part of the government's changing policy in the ever-changing educational landscape. This is evidenced by proposals for change in stakeholder consents by Sport England in the planning process proposed by The Planning and Infrastructure Bill which she has recently commented on. Thought leadership and being able to shape government policy at educational events is something that Jo is passionate about.
Jo has recently acted on the property elements of FE college mergers including working on the due diligence on multiple campuses with a multi-million pound value; the release of bank charges; facilitating third party consents to deal with restrictions on title; protecting overage agreements and grant agreements and advising on the property aspects of a business transfer agreement.
Jo has acted on the property aspects for an FE College's sustainability project to install solar panels and heat pumps. The project made use of the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme. The project involved complicated titles and ensuring that no third party rights were affected. There were significant VAT implications with the need to work alongside a team of accountants for the college is setting up the deal structure.
Jo works in the Commercial Property Team based across the Bristol and Birmingham offices but works nationally for education clients across the country.
What others say
Jo has been consistently ranked in Chambers and Partners and Legal 500 for the last 3 years.
"Joanne Burton is very good"
What you might like to know
Jo likes to walk her labrador in the countryside with her family.
Other teams Jo works with
Jo works with teams across the academies and maintained sector including construction, planning, corporate and commercial and regulatory teams.
